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CJDE2RIGHT DEPOSm 



The Big Business of 
Life 



The Btisiness of Abolishing Work and 

Turning This World Back 

into a Playground 



Success for All 



By Ralph Parlette 

Author of "The University of Hard Knocks," "It's Up To Youl" 
«*Go On South!*' etc. 



PUBLISHED BY 

PARLETTE-PADGET COMPANY 
CHICAGO 



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Copyrighted 1917, 1919, 1920 

by 

PARLETTE-PADGET COMPANY 

CHICAGO 



All Rights Reserved 



M 23 1922 

©CI.A677334 




^M ^ T? ?7 ^ ^ 4 



Here's Another Lecture-Book 

You HAVE BEEN BLESSEDLY KIND, Friend 
Reading Public, in taking edition after edition. of my 
first lecture-book, ''The University of Hard Knocks." 
I say lecture-book because the book was the reproduction 
in type of many deliveries (about 4,000) of the lecture on 
that subject. 

You emboldened me to print another lecture-book, "The 
Big Business of Life," embodying many deliveries of the 
lecture on this subject. The first edition was pretty crude, 
wasn't it ? I helped it some in the second edition. And here 
comes the third edition of it. I have rewritten it again and 
tried to make it a bit more human. 

I am so grateful to you ! 

This idea of Flashlights and Batteries grips me, no matter 
how far-fetched it may appear. This is only a hint of the 
book I hope some day to write on this subject — with your 
help. Write me a letter, will you? Tell me about your 
dreams, and what you have been learning about Batteries, 
Calls, Turning Work into Play, Enlarging Playgrounds, 
Welfare Work and Vocational Guidance. 

I made these crude little sketches scattered thru the book, 
hoping they might make the Flashlight idea clearer in each 
chapter they head. Please do not blame a professional 
artist. 

The third lecture-book will soon be out. Two lecturettes 



THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

for hasty readers are coming, too. See what you have 
brought upon yourself by encouraging me ! 

Blessed are we as we find our playgrounds. And more 
blessed as we go on enlarging them I 



Chicago, Dec. i, 1920. \/uuU^)¥ar^^ 



Qa£(S^ 




What's in It? 

CHAPTER I. WHAT ARE WE? Human Flashlights Full of Bat- 
teries. The little children and the flashlight — Success not in get- 
ting gold bands, diamonds, big house, but in shining — A world full 
of flashlights — We are Human Flashlights — Complete succe,ss for all 
in shining — "What career shall I choose?" — Our Ability and life 
batteries — Shine your light ! — All seeking happiness everywhere — 
Only two places, Outside and Inside 11 

CHAPTER II. THE OUTSIDERS. Why Getters Never Get Happiness. 
The world's disappointment in getting things — "Coin' from where 
dey are to where dey ain't" — Getting my toe, the moon, the, hornets' 
nest — Getting to Carcassonne — Each envies the other — The "tired 
business man," and why — Happy and unhappy children — King Got- 
it-all hunts for the undershirt of the contented man to find happi- 
ness — Happiness not on the Outside, but on the Inside 25 

CHAPTER III. THE INSIDERS. They Find Happiness in Shining. 
Getting back to "Home, Sweet Home" — We are Aladdins with won- 
derful lamps — All nature successful, because natural — Finding our 
batteries like game of "find the thimble" — We are called by our bat- 
teries—The call of Samuel — The fiddle calling the boy— The call of 
the child Jesus — Success not measured in salary — Salaries often con- 
fessions — Why we take money — Big Business is all C. O. D. — Highly 
paid people — The successful old schoolteacher — Winning the "Dirty 
Dozen" — Get your pay as you go — Analyze, your motives 34 

CHAPTER IV. TURN WORK INTO PLAY. And Find Your Play- 
grounds. Difference between work and play — The greater games of 
life — The great players in the community — Merchants, bankers, doc- 
tors, lawyers, newspapermen, schoolteachers, etc. — I am learning 
hoAV to play — Great world players — Michelangelo, Shakespeare, 
Edison, Sunday, Cohan — "Sadie," artist in dough — The aristocracy 
of workmanship — We must all turn our work into play, find our 
playgrounds and go on enlarging them 57 

CHAPTER V. "WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" More Self-Expres- 
sion the "Labor Problem." More wages, less work, fewer hours of 
work the demand — All must shine more to be happiej, not merely 
get more — Fencing in our playgrounds — We must warm up and light 
up; — We must get new interests — Getting the inside urge turns daily 
grind into daily game — The Welsh eisteddfod playground — The great 
workers who play — Secretary Hodge says workexs must find larger 
expression — Babson says our salvation depends upon restoring child's 
joy of production in industrial workers — The real shop welfare work 
— Crusade for self-development — Each a natural monopoly of Being 
Ourself — Not playing for gate-receipts — ^The conductor who cheered 
us — ^The joy of radiation — World needs small change more than for- 
tunes — Go on growing to go on being happy 72 



8 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

CHAPTER VI. EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS. It Is Finding 
and Shining All Batteries. Education covers whole fiejd, for all life is 
expression— Education must make us happy — "Warmer" and "colder" 
studies in school — The "blockhead" in school — The misfit teacher — 
Some shining "blockheads" — "Find the thimble" schools — Organiza- 
tion of Flashlight Clubs — Barnum on mistaking vocations — The call- 
ing of Biddy /Brahma — Father's chicken a duck, too — Dodging the 
pulpit for the printshop — Behind the scenes with a lecturer — Parents 
should let children naturally de.velop — Lop-sided schooling and com- 
mercialized education — Educational snobbery — We. are all bossed — 
Self-development stops jealousy — Schools must teach success — All the 
world a great school 91 

CHAPTER VII. YES, YOU CAN! It's Never Too Late to Succeed. 
Don't discourage the dreams of children — Canning "you can't" — 
Schumann-Heink wouldn't give up — Poverty a great stimulus — True 
calls and false calls — Follow call wherever it leads — If manager 
won't hire you to sing, go home and sing — Encourage the amateurs — 
Go on writing, no matter if they won't print it — Get a "mealticket" 
job— Nature supports herself — We must shine all around-^—Happiness 
possible everywhere — Look right around you — Happiness more 
than cheerful veneer — Jesus not the man of sorrows — Get out of 
your cage — The rejuvenation of Napoleon Bonaparte — He was an 
eagle — But he thought he was a chicken! — Irrigate the arid West of 
humanity — Everybody potentially great — Big Business the philos- 
ophejs' stone that transmutes every life into a golden one.,,.,,.... 120 



THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 



We m all Human FlaMighh 

gur^Big Business ijOevelopjngOdvej 
ijninind the 



rinding ourBalteriwunilSinini them 



Wefittve 
Life Batferies 
atidAbilityBI 



.SiiininQoiirMteries 

isturninjWork 

into Play 



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The Big Business of Life 

CHAPTER I 

WHAT ARE WE? 

Human Flashlights Full of Batteries 

(The lecturer holds a flashlight before the audience.*) 

LET ME TALK to the children first. ''Children, you 
see this flashlight in my hands. It is from one of 
the oldest and most exclusive flashlight factories in 
the land. The makers of this flashlight trace their ancestry 
back to the Mayflower. It was finished under the best 
masters. It is a very successful flashlight, isn't it?" 
"We don't know, mister. Why don't you — " 
"What? You don't know? Well Ffl take it to older, 
wiser people, and they'll know." So I go out on the street 
and ask the people who go by to look at my flashlight. 'Tt 
is a very successful flashlight, isn't it, people?" 

"No, sir," says one. "Why, man, what can you expect 
for only two dollars ? Your flashlight is only brass. Noth- 

*This book is a reproduction of lectures on "The Big Business 
of Life" the author has long given before lyceum, chautauqua and 
other audiences. Hence the colloquial style. 
11 



12 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

ing that cheap can be a success. Get gold bands around 
it, if you want it recognized as a success." 

Well ! Well ! I go to work and toil and save until I have 
gold bands around it. Now I say, "Flashlight, you are a 
great, golden success. See, children, how successful it is." 

"But, mister, it isn't a success. Why don't you — ?" 

I refuse to listen to these ignorant children. I go up 
and down the street again asking, "How can I make my 
flashlight a success?" A society queen replies, "You must 
put diamonds around it and a sunburst on the bottom, and 
then it will be the most beautiful and sought-after flashlight 
in the city." 

Fine !' I go to work and save my money year after year. 
■At last I have my flashlight covered with diamonds. "Hur- 
rah ! What a glittering success my flashlight is now !" 

"Aw ! That isn't a success !" cry the children around me. 
"Why don't you — " 

But I rush down the street again. What do these simple 
children know about success? I must ask "successful," 
"solid" people. "Tell me, successful people, why isn't my 
flashlight a success?" 

"So far you have run well," replies a gentleman with a 
voice about as juiceless as a cash-register. "But keep on 
running. You are just starting to make it succeed. You 
must get it into a big house on Easy Street. Nothing can 
succeed down there in that little house on Tincan Alley. 
You must get it into a big house up among our best people. 
Then the public will point to your house and say, 'There 
is the most successful flashlight in our city. It came here 
worth only two dollars and now see where it lives !' " 

"O, thank you, Mr. Juiceless Cashregister. I am only 
in middle life yet, and maybe I can yet toil and save till I 
get the big house.'* So I do toil and save and sacrifice for 
years until I manage to have the big house right up among 



WHAT ARE WE? 13 

the best people, with a flock of servants and flunkies and 
things. I have made my flashHght at last a great success, 
for I hear the people say as they pass and point to my house, 
"There lives the most successful flashlight in our city. It 
came here v^rorth only two dollars and now see the biggest 
house in the city where it lives." 

But I hear the children on the street say, "That old flash- 
light isn't a success yet. Why doesn't he — " 

And something inside of me says that same thing. I am 
unsatisfied, disappointed, unhappy, I am old and worn-out, 
all my years spent in getting the gold bands, the diamonds 
and the big house. It is all empty. Life is a failure, all 
pursuit and no possession. Let me die, I have nothing more 
to live for! 

"Please, mister," ask those little children, "WHY DON'T 
YOU PRESS THE BUTTON?" 

"Button? Button? Who's got the button? Is there a 
button to it? What has that got to do with my flashlight? 
Press that thing?" 

IT SHINES ! 

Well! Well! At last light! Why, now it is a success! 
A success anywhere — in a big house or a little house, in 
brass or gold, or diamonds. It isn't what's outside of it 
but what is inside of it coming out. Why didn't fhey tell 
me that years ago? How much happiness I have missed! 
The button right there all the time under my hand! 

SUCCESS IS SHINING! Then press the button, shine 
and succeed. 

A World Full of FlashHghts 

My friends, I have actually shown a flashlight to many 
groups of little children and they have given me these an- 
swers. Now if children instinctively see the truth of this, 



14 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

don't you think this flashlight is a good place to start to 
study this baffling, bewildering problem of human success 
and happiness? 

Can I get you to change your world for the purposes of 
this discussion ? Please lose the ordinary world full of peo- 
ple, flowers, plants, trees and animals. Instead of these see 
living flashlights. See a world full of Hving flashlights — 
Human Flashlights, flower flashlights, plant flashlights, tree 
flashlights and animal flashlights. See instead of that forest 
a vast assemblage of tree flashlights of different kinds, 
thousands of them standing side by side. See that lawn and 
meadow just acres of grass flashlights. See that cornfield 
just acres of cornstalk flashlights in rows upon rows. See 
the flowers as different kinds of flower flashlights. 

Take a little time to visualize a world of flashlights and 
I believe some of the mysteries will disappear. See that bird 
flying overhead as a bird flashlight. See all the birds as 
winged, feathered flashlights. See all the other animals the 
same way — horse flashlights, dog flashlights, cat flashlights, 
- fish flashlights ! 

And all the people Human Flashlights! You and I and 
everybody else Human Flashlights — big, little, tall, short, 
thick, thin Human Flashlights. They fill the houses, they 
crowd the streets. Human Flashlights in kitchens, down in 
mines, standing over machines, carrying hods, sitting in 
offices, bossing other Human Flashlights and getting bossed 
by Human Flashlights. Human Flashlights loafing in par- 
lors among the Four Hundred and loafing on park benches 
among the Four Thousand. Human FlashHghts all, no 
matter whether dressed in robes or rags. 

Awkward, unnatural to look at the world this way, you 
say? Please don't go farther till this flashlight idea soaks 
in. I believe if you'll stop long enough to see it clearly we'll 
have a fine time all the way thru. The idea seemed at first 



WHAT ARE WE? 15 

awkward and far-fetched to me. But the longer I thought 
about it, the more right, true and natural it seemed to me to 
see. this world as filled with animated flashlights. 

Every flashlight has batteries. Shining them is success. 

So every Human Flashlight, every plant and animal flash- 
light, has batteries. Shining them is success. 

You see every plant and animal shining its batteries. 
That is being natural. That is living, functioning. We call 
their kingdom the kingdom of nature, because they naturally 
shine and succeed. 

S.o there is only one thing for us Human Flashlights to 
do— be natural, SHINE AND SUCCEED! That is the 
Big Business of Life. Each of us Human Flashlights has a 
different outfit of batteries. (We generally call them 
"talents," ''abilities," "powers," etc., but I like this word 
batteries, because it means positive action and service.) We 
have to find what batteries we have and press the buttons 
and make them shine. 

Every time we shine a battery, it grows like the muscle 
of the arm from use, AND THAT GROWING MAKES 
US HAPPY. Every time we neglect to shine a battery, it 
shrivels, AND THAT SHRIVELING MAKES US UN- 
HAPPY. We are happy and unhappy in "spots." 

So we must shine them all. To shine only part is to be- 
come an unhappy freak like the horse that only grew one 
long leg and fell over crippled, or the tree that grew one 
long branch and toppled to wreck. 

Getting Out of Jail 

When I saw this a world full of flashlights, I clapped my 
hands and yelled, "Hurrah !" It was Hke getting out of jail. 
This world has built a jail of false notions about success 
and happiness for Human Flashlights. I agree with you 



16 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

the man on the street, the society lady and Mr. Juiceless 
Cashregister would not insist on the brass flashlight getting 
the gold bands, the diamonds, the big house in order to 
succeed, but do they not insist that the Human Flashlight 
get the gold bands, the diamonds and the big house in order 
to be successful and happy? 

And is not this false and limited idea of success, that suc- 
cess and happiness are for the limited few who can get the 
gold bands, the diamonds and the big house, the cause of the 
unnatural development, the unrest and urihappiness in the 
world today? 

Success and happiness for everybody alike who is willing 
to shine f Isn't that deliverance from jail? 

We are not hodcarriers, housekeepers or bankers; we 
are all Human Flashlights shining a few of our batteries 
carrying hods, keeping house or running banks. What are 
we doing with the rest of our batteries? How many bat- 
teries we are shining determines how successful and happy 
we are. When the hodcarrier shines all his batteries, he is 
just as successful as the housekeeper or the banker can be. 

The other morning I saw 15,000 Human Flashlights car- 
rying dinner-pails, go to work in a great manufacturing 
plant. The Human Flashlight who built and operates this 
plant is considered a shining success. I really do not know 
how successful he is, for I do not know how many of his 
batteries he shines, which decides how happy he is. You 
tell me how happy a man is and I'll tell you how successful 
he is. Some of the most unsuccessful people I know live 
in some of the biggest houses, and others just as unsuccess- 
ful live in some of the smallest houses. They are unhappy, 
because not shining all-around. 

But if I did not believe that every one of the 15,000 
working in that plant could and SHOULD be just as suc- 
cessful as the one who built and runs it, I would believe 



WHAT ARE WE? 17 

that this universe was run by an unjust and unloving God. 
Surely each of the 15,000 cannot build and operate such a 
plant, for they haven't that kind of batteries, perhaps. But 
each can find what batteries he does have, and shine them. 
That is being just as successful and happy as the one at the 
head of the plant can possibly be. 

That is getting out of the world's false jail. Hurrah! 
There is just as much success and happiness for one as an- 
other. There is just as much success for the blade of grass 
in being itself, as there is for the giant oak in being itself. 
And there is only one person who can decide whether we 
will be successful or unsuccessful and unhappy — OUR- 
SELF. All of us can press the buttons, shine and succeed. 

''What Career Shall I Choose?" 

Then we have the answer to that perplexing question. 
O, how we worry over it ! The high school graduate going 
out to "take charge of the world" looks in the mirror and 
asks, "What career shall I choose in life?" And the fate 
of worlds seems to rest upon that decision! The proud 
parent asks, "What career shall we choose for our child? 
What shall we make out of the precious darling?" And we 
older ones who seem not to have found our place ask, 
"What shall I do next?" 

We talk about choosing a career as tho we were choos- 
ing a necktie or an automobile ! We cannot choose a career ; 
the career chooses us. We cannot make something out of 
the child or out of ourselves. We are already made. All 
we can ever do is to untie the strings, take off the wrappings 
and see what is inside. "Loose him and let him go." And 
grow ! 

Wouldn't that question be funny out in nature? "What 
career shall I choose?" 



18 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

See that little apple-sprout coming up thru the ground. 
"What career shall I choose? Shall I be an apple-tree or a 
gooseberry bush?" See those little onions I planted stick- 
ing their green noses up thru the ground. "What career 
shall we choose ? Shall we be cabbages or dill-pickles ? Say, 
boys, let's be strawberries. Strawberries get so much 
money." 

The little bird might as well ask, "Mama, shall I fly or 
blossom?" The little fish might as well ask, "Shall I sing?" 

Nothing in nature ever makes a mistake. That is why 
we call it nature. No plant or animal ever goes to a voca- 
tional diagnostician to know what to do in life. Something 
inside tells each one what to do. That something is the 
batteries, and each lets its own batteries naturally shine. 

The apple-tree lets its apple-tree batteries shine. It has 
no gooseberry batteries. The onions are full of good, strong 
onion batteries and just let them shine. The bird is full of 
fly and sing batteries. The flower has blossom batteries. The 
fish has swim batteries. The sun has shine batteries, the old 
hen has cackle batteries. If she should try to shine, she 
would wail, "Nobody loves me." But she is a greater suc- 
cess than the sun at cackling. So each of us is the greatest 
success being our natural self. The eagle has soar batteries, 
the mule has bray batteries. If the eagle should try to bray, 
the proud bird of our country would have to come right 
down off our banner. And if the mule should try to soar, 
the price of mules would come down. 

The grasshopper hops because he is full of hop batteries, 
and in hopping he is far more successful than the elephant. 
If the elephant should try to hop like the grasshopper, he 
would certainly muss up the map. The most successful 
church building would be perhaps the greatest failure as a 
boiler factory. A locomotive is a grand success pulling 
trains, but a total failure at mowing lawns. Anybody who 



WHAT ARE WE? 19 

has ever had a locomotive mow a lawn will tell you that. 

Silly talk, you say? Yes, but not any more foolish than 
so much of the strut and pose and unnaturalness about 
"choosing a career.'* Human Flashlights try to be some- 
thing unnatural or get something unnecessary. They try 
to be monkeys instead of men, parrots and peacocks instead 
of people. Some even try to be pigs ! 

There is a happy and successful career for each one of 
us. Look within. Don't worry. Don't hurry. We cannot 
miss anything. What is ours will come to us just as fast 
as we develop our batteries. Nobody can steal our success. 
I congratulate you as I congratulate myself that we have 
the wonderful privilege of Being Ourself. Nobody else can 
be Ourself, and we can be nobody else. We have a natural 
monopoly on Being Ourself. 

What Batteries Have We? 

I believe each Human Flashlight has an assortment of 
what we might call ABILITY BATTERIES, no two of us 
with the same outfit. These are variously classified as imi- 
tation, observation, initiative, invention, construction, deduc- 
tion, vision and such. Developing these batteries decides 
whether we can shine best as artists, writers, musicians, 
ministers, teachers, lawyers, merchants, bankers, farmers, 
mechanics or in the thousand other fields of mental and 
physical service. 

Schools and colleges are mainly engaged in developing 
these batteries. We commonly call this education, but it is 
only one small part of the complete education. Vocational 
training is making a fine start here. But most vocational 
guidance so far is little more than employment agency work. 

Underlying, overtopping all these in importance are the 



20 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

great LIFE BATTERIES of spiritual light and power. I 
might call them the batteries of Faith, Hope and Love. 
Developing these is the greater education. They shine out 
as honesty, courage, courtesy, gentleness, kindness, sincerity, 
humility, unselfishness, purity, modesty, meekness, temper- 
ance, trustworthiness, wisdom, understanding. These bat- 
teries brighten and warm everything we do. Without them 
our activities, no matter how skillful and efficient, are 
"sounding brass and tinkling cymbal." 

The speech is only empty words, the song only meaning- 
less notes, the book only dry sentences without the glorify- 
ing, vitalizing light and warmth of these Life Batteries. 
Here is the secret of power and greatness. Here is the 
magic of beauty. Regular features and charming complex- 
ion are worthwhile, but with these alone there is nothing 
to hold the admiration. We soon tire of the doll-face with 
nothing behind it. Yet the plainest face becomes beautiful, 
warmed and lighted by sympathy, modesty, love and the 
radiance of the Life batteries. Soul beauty never fades. 
You cannot buy it at a drug store and rub it on, you grow 
it from the batteries within. The plain, homely face of 
Abraham Lincoln has been pronounced by great artists one 
of the most beautiful in the world. It was glorified by the 
light of those great Life batteries he developed in the 
Gethsemanes of his career. 

So the Ability batteries are only the vehicle for the trans- 
mission of the light of the Life batteries. And the person 
who shines his Ability batteries alone is an empty wagon 
rattling thru life. 

The world is wearied and burdened with a deluge of 
cleverness and smartness. But the world cries out ahun- 
gered for sympathy, light, life, love. We have gone to seed 
on efficiency in mechanics and conservation. But we are just 
beginning to see the vast need for the inspiration of the 



WHAT ARE WE? 21 

heart to prompt the head and hand. The schools have de- 
veloped the Ability batteries magnificently, but they so far 
have barely made a start in the far more important work of 
appealing to the Life batteries. The sad failures are the 
ones with only head-development. The educated rascal is 
the most dangerous, because only partly educated. The 
sophistries of the demagog are the blind leading the blind. 
Here is the universal democracy of success. All work is 
great and glorious alike whether following the plow or 
leading the procession, when illuminated with a great life. 
All work is contemptible, dark, cold, unsatisfying, without 
it. 

''Shine Your Light!'' 

The Great Teacher once said to his pupils, "Let your light 
so shine." One day I looked it up in the original Greek in 
which it was written down as he uttered it. I was amazed 
(and delighted), to discover he did not merely suggest that 
we shine our light, if we feel like it and have nothing else to 
do and it doesn't rain. No. What he really said was put 
imperatively, as a command, "SHINE YOUR LIGHT!" 
Make it shine, whether you feel like it or not, and you will 
feel like it. 

These ages we have perhaps thought that saying was a 
dreamy bit of sentiment or imagery, when in fact he was 
giving the great secret of success and happiness — SHINE 
AND SUCCEED! 

And that gives added meaning to that old saying, "You've 
got it in you." Yes! Now your Big Business is getting it 
out! 

All of Us Seeking Happiness 

What do we all want? HAPPINESS. This is the uni- 
versal goal. 



22 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

We get up in the morning to be happy. I used to think 
if I could lie in bed I would be happier. But I find when 
I do lie in bed the neighbors talk about me and my business 
goes to smash, so I average it and find I am happier when I 
get up than when I lie in bed — Harry Lauder's famous 
song to the contrary. 

Most of us are happier going with the majority than in 
being non-conformists. 

I used to dream that some day I'd be so rich and retired 
I could wind my alarm-clock and set it to go off early. Then 
when it did go off, I would smash it with my shoe and sleep 
all day. But I am learning as I look around at the rich and 
retired, who do not have to get up with alarm-clocks, that 
most of the happy people do have to rise when some bell 
calls. 

I used to worry when a boy about having to wash my face 
every morning — and so far around, clear back of my ears ! 
But I am learning I have to do so many things I do not 
want to do, in order to be able to do the things I do want to 
do. We all have to build considerable track to get to our 
playgrounds and lay much wire to give our batteries expres- 
sion. 

Whatever we are doing, it is to be happy, whether we 
realize it or not. 

Some people take a cold bath every morning to be happy. 
Sometimes I think they get most of their happiness telling 
other people about it. There be other tribes who believe 
that to be happy one must boycott bathtubs. 

The boy wants to be a man to be happy. The man wants 
to be a boy to be happy. The father says to his son, "My 
boy, come hither. I would speak to thee." The child obeys 
— to be happy! 

Just look down the street at the throng of Human Flash- 
lights, pushing, jostling, hurrying to get somewhere' to be 



WHAT ARE WE? 23 

happy. A million going a million different directions. One 
is hurrying home to be happy, another is hurrying away 
from home, to be happy. One is hunting somebody, and 
another is dodging somebody, to be happy. One is seeking 
employment and another is avoiding employment, to be 
happy. One is going to the country, another is going to the 
city, to be happy. One is lying to others, another is lying 
to himself, to be happy. 

I look over the old family album and marvel as I study 
the daguerreotypes of one generation, the tintypes of an- 
other and the platinum prints and kodaks of yet another — 
marvel at what humanity has cheerfully suffered in the name 
of style to be happy. We have pinched our feet and stretched 
our necks and punctured our purses to be happy. We have 
shivered in winter gauze and sweltered in summer furs. I 
look in dismay on the stovepipe hats and tight trousers of 
Lincoln^s day, and the old-fashioned hoops that were the 
happiness of the gentler sex. They looked like haystacks or 
circus-tents. Mother looked like an umbrella opened. Daugh- 
ter today looks more like an umbrella closed! 

Even the man who does not believe happiness possible 
for him goes right on carrying his load to be happy. He 
knows that he would be more unhappy to drop it on his 
toes. If he ends his existence here, he simply believes he 
will be happier dead than alive. 

Only Two Places for Happiness 

So the millions of Human Flashlights seek happiness in 
millions of different places. But they all boil down into two 
places. There are only two places in which to seek happi- 
ness— OUTSIDE of us and INSIDE of us. 

The Outsiders seek their happiness in the outside results 
of their shining. 



24 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

The Insiders seek their happiness in the successful de- 
velopment of their batteries in shining. 

The Outsiders are the lop-siders. They go on develop- 
ing their Ability Batteries that get them things and shrivel 
their Life Batteries. They are the Getters, the Little Busi- 
ness Men. 

The Insiders are the all-siders. They go on trying to de- 
velop all their Ability and Life Batteries. They are the 
Growers, the Big Business Men. 




CHAPTER II 
THE OUTSIDERS 

Why Getters Never Get Happiness 

JUST A WORD about this disappointing game of get. 
Most of us spend most of our lives trying to get the 
gold bands, the diamonds and the big house. We want 
to succeed. "When I get that I'll be happy." 

So we get the big house, and it becomes just as monoto- 
nous as the little house — more monotonous, for there is more 
of it to get monotonous. We find that lobster salad gets 
just as tasteless as mush and milk on our fevered palate. 
We find that silk gets just as hateful as cotton on a dis- 
contented, disappointed back. We find that managing a mil- 
lion is more trouble than managing a mule. We find that 
every vote that puts us into office is not a boost but a burden 
— a liability, not an asset. 

And the siren Goddess of Get says, "Get more! You'll 
be happy when you get more." 

Somebody asked a porter on a California-bound train, 
"George, where are all these people going?" "Doan* know, 
boss, but I 'spose dey's goin' from where dey is to where 
dey ain't." The feeling grows on me that this fever to get 
things is just "goin* from where dey is to where dey ain't" 
— moving from Inside to Outside. 
25 



26 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

We Must Get Things 

Yes, we must get things — get them not for the sake of 
getting, but as wires to conduct the current from our bat- 
teries. Keep them well insulated, else they will shock, be- 
numb and kill. 

Get money, land, power just as much as our batteries need 
for development, as the boy gets the ball-bat that he can 
play a better game of ball. Get them as a carpenter gets 
tools that he can better shine his carpenter batteries. 

It is fine to get the gold bands, the diamonds and the big 
house, for these help us to express ourselves harmoniously. 
They make us comfortable. But being comfortable is far 
from being happy. Some of the most comfortably situated 
people are the unhappiest, and some of the most uncom- 
fortably situated people are the happiest. 

All other getting is like piling up snowballs. We press 
them to our bosom and they freeze our heart. And then 
melt! The Outsiders let their Life Batteries shrivel. 

Getting My Toe 

I think I can remember when I was in a cradle. I am not 
positive, but I have a hazy memory of lying in a little crib 
and being very unhappy. I told them I wasn't happy. You 
have no idea how often I told them I wasn't happy. "Wah- 
ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah ! I'm not happy !'* 

I did not speak their language. The barbarians around 
my crib did so many things to me to make me happy. They 
handled me, dandled me, dangled me, strangled me, scram- 
bled me, addled me, paddled me and committed other loving 
atrocities. 

I wanted so many things. One day I saw something wig- 
gle at the other end of the cradle. It was a little pink thing 



THE OUTSIDERS 27 

that stuck out from under the covers. ''Ah ! That is what I 
want. I want my toe. Here, you barbarians, get me my toe. 
I want my toe and then I'll be happy. Get me my toe !" 

Nobody got me my toe. I had to get it myself. It was 
hard work for a baby like me to get my toe. It has always 
been hard for me to make both ends meet. But at last I 
got my toe. I put it in the only pocket a baby has. But my 
toe- did not taste half so good as I thought it was going 
to taste. I was so disappointed in my toe. 

"Wah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah ! I want to be happy!" 

Getting the Moon 

Then I saw something shiny right up there thru the win- 
dow. "Ah ! That is what I want — that shiny thing up there. 
Here, you barbarians, get me the moon!" 

But nobody got me the moon and I had to get it myself. 
It was hard work for a baby to get the moon. I would 
reach for it, but the bad old moon would go away from me. 
I kept reaching for the moon farther and farther. I did 
not get the moon at all. But I fell out of the crib and 
bumped my head on the floor. 

These years since I have seen a great many larger babies 
crying and struggling to get the moon, to be happy. 1 have 
never seen any of them get the moon, but I have seen a lot 
of soreheads! 

Getting That Paper Thing 

And then one day when I was a "right smart of a boy" 
(more smart than right), I was going thru the woods with 
father — ^thru the big woods around our cabin home in what 
was then the "Black Swamp" of Ohio. I saw a queer round 
thing that looked like it was made out of gray paper, hang- 
ing up in a tree. It was pear-shaped, and the limb looked 
like it was shoved thru the top of the gray paper thing. 



28 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

"O, daddy, look there ! See that gray paper thing hang- 
ing up there in that tree. Daddy, let's get that." 

But daddy was not interested. He took me by the arm 
and led me away from that tree. *'My boy, you don't want 
that gray paper thing. You would not know what to do 
with it if you had it. You would be very sorry if you 
got it. And furthermore, I forbid you to get it." 

That settled it. I got it. What I am telling you is one of 
the warmest, keenest, most vivid memories of my boyhood. 
Father went away that afternoon, and I kept thinking about 
that gray paper thing hanging up in that tree. ''Father is a 
nice old man, but he isn't up-to-date. He doesn't know 
what a boy needs nowadays to make him happy. I just got 
to get that gray paper thing or I'll never be happy.'* 

I went back to that tree. I got a long pole and set forth 
in eager anticipation. *T am going to be very happy pretty 
soon." I got back to that tree, and there was the gray paper 
thing yet hanging up on the limb. "Now watch me get very 
happy." I can see myself jabbing that pole up into that 
gray paper ball that was nearly a foot in diameter. It fell ! 

Father was right! 

I shall not describe what followed. I want you to be 
happy ! It was a painful subject for a long time. I did not 
want it. I did not know what to do with it after I got it. 
I was very sorry I got it. It was a hornets' nest ! 

These three childhood memories tell me about all there 
is to this game of selfish getting. If we don't get it we have 
a sore head. If we do get it we soon get tired of it — or get 
stung ! 

Hunting for "Carcassonne*' 

So the cynic says, "Happiness is in pursuit, not in pos- 
session !" How ardently we have debated that in our literary 



THE OUTSIDERS 29 

societies! So the poor old French peasant sighed his Hfe 
thru in that wonderful poem, "Carcassonne," by Gustave 
Nadaud : 

"I'm growing old; just threescore years, 

In wet and dry, in dust and mire, 
I've sweated, never getting near 

Fulfillment of my heart's desire. 
Ah, well I see that bliss below 

*Tis heaven's will to grant to none; 
Harvest and vintage come and go — 

I've never got to Carcassonne!" 

Thru the years this peasant toiled and dreamed of the 
happiness in store for him if he could just see the gay city 
and the people of Carcassonne "five long leagues" away 

"So sighed a peasant oi Limoux, 

A worthy neighbor, bent and worn; 
*Ho, friend,' quoth I, 'I'll go with you, 

We'll sally forth tomorrow morn!* 
And true enough, away we hied. 

But when our goal was almost won, 
God rest his soul, the good man died — 

He never got to Carcassonne!" 

Outsiders always die before they get to "Carcassonne." 
Insiders find "Carcassonne" comes to them. It is all around 
them, and they see it as they press the button and let their 
light shine. 

The peasant of Limoux would not have been as happy in 
"Carcassonne" as he was down in his vineyard in the valley, 
for he would have been a misfit there. He was "goin* from 
where dey are to where dey ain*t." 



30 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

The old cow is a rank Outsider when she stands in a good 
pasture and looks yearningly over the fence into the corn- 
field. "O, if I could just get over the fence into 'Carcas- 
sonne/ I would be the happiest cow in the world." So 
Sister Cow leaves her real "Carcassonne/' jumps the fence, 
and becomes the unhappiest cow in the county. 

The first piece of pie tastes the best ! 

The meek and patient mule has been jeered at and joked 
about. But take off your hat to the mule. He is not an Out- 
sider. He is a Big Business mule. He can be in an ocean 
of food, but he never eats more than enough to satisfy his 
hunger. Nothing can induce him to overeat. You never 
saw a dyspeptic mule. 

Each Envies the Other 

"Carcassonne" is written on the faces of the hurrying 
crowd in the city. "Carcassonne" is the guide-post along 
the country road. The rich man in the game of get rides 
thru the country in his car. "There is the happy man/* he 
says as he looks over into the field where a farmer with 
his sleeves rolled up is hard at work. "There is the happy 
man. He has the carefree Hfe. He lives in the fresh air 
and sunshine. It is a dog's life I live shut up in my office. 
O, I wish I were over in that field where I could be happy !" 

And that farmer over in the field, if he is also an Outsider, 
straightens the kinks out of his back and looks over at the 
man in the big car. "There is the happy man. He has the 
carefree life. He has nothing to do but ride around, wear 
good clothes, live in the city and have everything that 
money can buy. It is a dog's life I live on this old farm. 
If I were only over in that car I'd be happy." 

"Button! Button! Who's got the button?" 



THE OUTSIDERS 31 

This is why we have to have so many shows specially 
designed for the "tired business man." This Outside busi- 
ness makes them tired. 

And speaking of shows, did you ever study the eager, 
expectant look of the crowd roped off waiting their turn to 
get into the theatre when the fourteenth episode of "Blood 
and Thunder" was grinding? They just know when they 
can get inside they will be happy. And the crowd inside 
just know when they can get outside they will be happy ! 

The most peevish, unhappy baby in the world is the one 
that gets continually entertained and humored. On the 
other side of the fence lived a rich boy who was showered 
with beautiful, costly toys. He threw them around and 
broke them. He had little joy in them. I used to think if 
I could only have one of them, I would be very happy. I 
had no "boughten" toys ; all my toys I had to make myself. 
One day his father gave him the most beautiful toy boat 
I ever saw. How I envied him ! I whittled out a little boat 
with my jack-knife and made a rag sail for it. I had a 
lot of joy sailing my little boat. I had made it myself. 

Presently the other boy threw his big boat away. "Gim- 
me your boat," he said. "You have more fun with that 
kind." 

Just so, the unhappiest people are the ones who hunt out- 
side for happiness. The unhappiest people are the ones 
who have every want gratified, who overwork every nerve 
of pleasure, who exhaust every physical sensation. 

Old King Got-It-AU 

You remember him? He got it all — all on the Outside. 
He had his palaces, his jewels, his robes, his feasts, his 
music, his fame, and all the machinery of his kingdom to 
make him happy on the Outside. 



32 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

But he had nothing on the Inside. He was the most selfish, 
vain creature in his kingdom, therefore, the unhappiest. 
He was so unhappy that he offered a reward to anybody 
who could cheer him up. He bade his chefs prepare him 
more wondrous feasts, but they only filled him with dyspep- 
sia. He ordered his royal opera company to sing more 
loudly, "There is no king but Got-It-All," and yet his grouch 
grew. 

One day King Got-It-AH called his soothsayers, magi- 
cians, counselors, astrologers, zoologers, psychologers and 
the other grand highs of his palace together. "I am so un- 
happy I cannot live. I haven't been happy for years. I 
haven't smiled for ages. I am going to die of a broken 
heart. Nobody ever was so unhappy. But you have to 
die first. Hearken! I give you only one more chance to 
live. Come back here at high noon tomorrow with a cure 
for iny unhappiness, something that will bring the roses 
back to my cheeks, or, by my halidom, off come your 
heads! Grind the royal axe!" 

Next day, after a sleepless night, the entire administration 
came back to cure King Got-It-All. One by one they ap- 
peared before him with a new cure for his unhappiness. 
Yet one by one he waved them aside. 

There was only one left. That one did not know what 
to say, for every known remedy for unhappiness had been 
offered him. 

''Little runt down there at the end of the line, what have 
you to say before we ring up the hearses !" roared the sor- 
rowing monarch. 

"O, king," he replied in the inspiration born of despera- 
tion, "if you would hunt thru your kingdom and find a per- 
fectly contented man, and wear his undershirt, I believe you 
would be happy." 

"Wear his undershirt ! O, aggregation of knavish mutts. 



THE OUTSIDERS 33 

this is too much! But just to show you before we all die 
that I tried to save you, I'll do it. Hold the hearses ! Ho ! 
Find nie a perfectly contented man. I want his undershirt.'' 

They telephoned. No — ^they didn't have telephones. But 
whatever they did, they did a lot of it. The king's mes- 
sengers went everywhere hunting a contented man. They 
couldn't find one! It sounds Hke America, but it wasn't — 
it was Ethiopia, or Oklahoma, or some place away off. At 
last they did find a contented man, tho he was a slave. He 
didn't take the papers and didn't know about this hullabaloo. 

"Ah! We have found you at last!" they shouted in 
triumph. *'Come right along, sir, immediately. We have 
been hunting for you for days to make the king happy." 

They led the slave with great rejoicing up the king's 
highway. The people shout, the newspapers get out extras. 
They have found the contented man at last, the king is go- 
ing to be happy and the price of living is coming down ! 

They lead the slave up into the palace — up into the pres- 
ence of the king to make him happy ! 

But the slave failed to make the king happy. 

He had no undershirt ! 

I do not know whether this ever happened or not. I 
read it out of the same book you have at home. But I 
know it is very true. The slave had little on the Outside 
to make him happy. It must have been on the Inside. 

I dislike this chapter just as much as you do. I am so 
glad we are thru with it. It is like going thru a hospital or 
a morgue. But we had to go thru it to be honest with this 
subject, for it is the path most of us travel in our own 
lives. 

Now let us go over into the real "Big Business." 




M' 



CHAPTER III 

THE INSIDERS 

They Find Happiness in Shining 

' ID PLEASURES and palaces, sadly I roam. Be 
it ever so humble, there's no place like home.'* 
Sooner or later all of us get tired of being Out- 
siders. Sooner or later we weary of chasing painted bubbles. 
Sooner or later every Prodigal Son tires of the husks and 
turns homeward — turns from the material Outside to the 
spiritual Inside, the only real home. Turns from accretion 
to unfoldment. 

When I was a little boy I would read that story of Alad- 
din and his wonderful lamp. Aladdin had but to rub his 
lamp and the genii would come to do his bidding. They 
found nothing impossible. They turned Aladdin's world 
into a wonderland. "O, I want to be Aladdin ! Where can 
I get an Aladdin lamp?" 

*'Hush, child!' You little f^ol! That is just a fairy story. 
Why will you read such stuff? It is not true." 

But down in my heart I believed it was true. It seemed 

right. Now after these years of "disillusionment" I am 

surer than ever that this Aladdin story is true. That is why 

it has lived all these years, because anything true cannot 

34 



THE INSIDERS 35 

die. The Aladdin story is just the oriental, round-about way 
of telling what I am trying to tell in this straightforward 
occidental story of the flashlight. Aladdin's wonderful lamp 
is this Human Flashlight, and you and I are Aladdins ! It 
is the lamp of our real being. 

As we press the buttons — rub the lamp — ^the light shines 
forth from the batteries of our being and transforms this 
tired, dull, disappointed world into a wonderland all around 
us. Wherever we live and labor, as we develop ourselves, 
shine our batteries, every prospect becomes enchanted. We 
become kings and queens, our lives and paths radiant with 
this light and joy of shining. 

Find Your "Thimbles" 

Then how find these batteries we all have, that light our 
.lives and make us successful? 

I have read many books on "Success in Life and How to 
Attain it." I have listened to learned lectures on this en- 
trancing theme, many of them given by people who were not 
overly successful themselves. I have often felt that if I 
had to do half the things they advise — had to observe half 
the wise maxims of the "successful" who write the pages 
of "do's" and "don't's," I would say, "Bury me tomorrow. 
I can never succeed." 

Then I look over nature and get a new cheer. I never see 
a bird look into the Encyclopedia Britannica to know 
whether to fly or to blossom. Something inside tells it what 
to do, and it never falters nor worries about "mistaking its 
calling." It just follows its call. 

And so every bird is a success ! And happy ! I never heard 
a bird say, "Life is a failure. I never had any chance like 
other birds. If I had been born in New York or Chicago I 



36 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

might have amounted to something, but stuck away out 
here in the backwoods no bird could succeed." 

There are some "birds" in New York and Chicago, but 
you never heard any bird talk that way. Every bird is a 
success, singing and developing out in the backwoods where 
nobody notices it just as much as where the multitude listens 
and admires it. Raise its salary and it could not be any 
more successful. 

Every flower is a success wherever you find it, just in 
being its natural self. Cultivation cannot make it more nat- 
ural ; it can only make it more beautiful and useful. And 
that is why we cultivate ourselves. In the heart of the 
Florida cypress swamps I have come upon moss-carpeted 
wonderlands full of flowers and orchids "going to waste" 
that New York would rave over. Up in the Alpine snows I 
have found the edelweiss as beautiful as the hothouse blos- 
soms. 

We used to play a game called "Find the thimble," that 
tells me more about life success and happiness than most 
of the polysyllabic profundity of the books and experts. 

You know one would be "it," and would have to go out of 
the room and hide. Then while "it" was out of the room 
we would hide the thimble. "All right !" we would say, and 
"it" would come in and begin to hunt for the thimble. You 
remember when "it" went the wrong way — went away from 
the thimble — we would say, "colder." If "it" had any sense 
he would not go any farther that way, for the thimble 
wasn't out that way. 

But when "it" went toward the thimble we would cry, 
"warmer !" And the nearer "it" got to the thimble the more 
we would say, "warmer!" "hotter!" "burning up!" until 
"it" would come right upon the thimble. 

Sometimes when I have a group of little folks down in 
the front when lecturing upon "Big Business," I do hide a 



THE INSIDERS 37 

thimble and play the game. The little folks get very excited 
and shout, ''warmer !" and "colder !" as I hunt the thimble. 
And presently the older folks in the audience get so inter- 
ested, some of them, that they join in and shout, as the 
happy memories of their childhood come back. I like to 
get a subject right down where the people live. And I like 
to make it so simple the children can understand, for they 
are the most important part, the garden soil, in every audi- 
ence. 

Well, don't you think that all successful and happy life 
is a day-to-day growing game of finding one "thimble'* 
after another? The thimbles are our batteries, and they 
call to us to shine them. When we go the wrong way or 
do the thing for which we have no ability, there is nothing 
withir us to respond, no light shines. So we are going the 
"colder" way, and if we keep on going the "colder" way, 
the world will presently call us a "frost." 

But when we go the right way, try to do or be the things 
for which we are fitted, something within us says, "warmer!" 
That little battery is beginning to shine and warm us. 
"Warmer ! warmer !" it says as we go on doing the things we 
love to do and that seem easy and natural for us to do, and 
our lives begin to brighten and warm, for Aladdin's lamp 
is commencing to brighten and enchant our world. 

We Are All /'Called" 

That is the call we hear so much about. When I was a 
boy a very solemn-faced man said to my father, "Brother 
Parlette, I have a call to preach the gospel." How fright- 
ened I was ! I had a mental picture of God — and I always 
pictured him as an angry old man with long whiskers, sit- 
ting upon a throne. I had read that God is angry with the 
wicked every day, and I knew I was wicked, for so many 



38 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

had told me so. They told me I would go to jail or be hung 
as an example to other bad preacher's sons. So I pictured 
God calling sternly over some long-distance wire, "John 
Alexander, is that you! Well, this is God talking. I have 
called you to preach the gospel. Never smile again." 

I hoped God would never call me! It seemed such a 
dreadful thing, like dying or having the dyspepsia. Now as 
I look back I think Brother Alexander's call was mostly 
lazy liver and a false sense of solemnity about his job. 
Brother Alexander was an austere man, with a clammy 
hand and a bad breath. He ate graham bread, and when 
we passed the pie to him (we had pie on a few sinfully 
happy occasions), he would ask, "Is it rich, sister?" I al- 
ways thought graham bread was holy and pie sinful because 
I liked it so well. 

And God was calling me all the time ! When a little boy 
in school I wanted to draw pictures on my slate, and the 
teacher would make me stand on the floor: He would say 
I was a bad boy for drawing pictures. And I wanted to 
be an editor. I would run a newspaper there in my desk, 
printed with my left hand, circulation one copy, subscrip- 
tion three pins "invariably in advance," and that teacher 
would keep the young journalist "in" after school and con- 
fiscate his entire edition ! 

I admit I was wrong in drawing a picture when I should 
have been studying my geography, especially a picture of 
my dear teacher! But I insist now that my draw-picture 
batteries were calling louder than my geography batteries. 
And my run-newspaper batteries were calling louder than 
my arithmetic batteries. 

We are called — all of us — all the time. Just silence the 
outside tumult and shouting and listen within. Not called 
over some mysterious long-distance telephone line, but called 
by our Life and Ability batteries that call for opportunity 



THE INSIDERS 39 

to shine and succeed. We are called to be natural and get 
into our Big Business. We are called to preach the gospel 
— we who have preach batteries — and we are called to ped- 
dle peanuts, if we have peddle batteries. We are called to 
teach, farm, paint, invent, merchandise, philosophize, peel 
potatoes and preside over nations. 

But the bird is never called to blossom ! You and I are 
never called to do something unnatural. We are bundles 
of batteries. None of us realize how great and varied are 
the talents we command. We spend our lifetime vaguely 
aware of the vast resources at our command and full of 
unrest because we do not develop them. There are stages 
of our life when our batteries lie silent like the chicken in the 
egg until they develop and crack the shells, crying, "Peep! 
peep! here I am! Use me! Press the button and let me 
shine!" That is the call. 

The Call of Samuel 

Is not that story of Samuel in the Bible the example of 
the perfect call ? Why do we so often read the Bible with 
our eyes shut as tho it were some mysterious book for an- 
other age and people, instead of a bundle of human glimpses 
of the divinity of Big Business for every age and people, 
that have survived for the very truth in them? 

What is there mysterious about the life of this lad Samuel, 
who lives the clean, unperverted life in the temple service 
and does not go out at nights with the Eli boys and have a 
"good time" with a thick head the next day? He can hear 
the voices within, for his senses are not dulled and his 
heart divided by the false calls. He lies in his bed at the 
close of the day. He hears, "Samuel! Samuel!" He runs 
to the bedside of the prophet Eli. "Mr. Eli, here I am, what 
do you want?'* 



40 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

"Sammy, what do you mean waking me up this way?, 
I didn't call you. Go back to bed. You have been dream- 
ing." 

Samuel does go back to bed, and presently hears the 
call again, ^'Samuel ! Samuel !" Again he hurries to the 
prophet's bedside. "Mr. Eli, now I know you called me. 
What do you want?" 

"No, Sammy," replied the good man, "I didn't call you. 
Go back to bed." Again Samuel goes back to bed wonder- 
ing, "Well, isn't that funny? Mr. Eli calls me and doesn't 
know it. He must call in his sleep." 

When the third time the voice calls, "Samuel ! Samuel !" 
and the third time Samuel goes to Eli's bedside, the old 
man says, "Samuel, I believe God is calling you. If you 
hear that voice again, say, 'Speak, Lord, for thy servant 
heareth.' " And Samuel did as told. He followed his calls 
into a long career of leadership. 

I wish there were more prophets among parents today. 
I believe every time you see a child trying to do something, 
reaching for a book, tool, brush or instrument — reaching 
you understand with a great desire to do something with it 
— the child is hearing the call, "Samuel! Samuel!" 

I believe every right yearning in the hearts of us older 
ones is the same Samuel call. I believe we can always know 
whether our call is Inside or Outside. The Inside call is 
from a battery whose light leads us up to a cleaner, brighter, 
higher, happier life. 

If I were in a pulpit today I would preach a sermon from 
this text, "Commit thy ways unto the Lord and he will" 
help you find your "thimble." Revised version ! 

Let the Boy Piddle! 

The other day a mother brought her boy into the parlor 
where I was "company" and said, "Do you think my boy 



THE INSIDERS 41 

will ever make a violinist ? He plays on that old fiddle from 
morning to night We just have to hide his fiddle to get him 
to bed. Now if you think he'll ever make a great violinist 
or be able to make more money on it than helping his 
father on the farm, I'll let him take lessons. If you don't, 
he has got to quit fooling away his time at it and go at 
something useful. 

I thought of Eli. He didn't say, "Samuel, if God calls 
again, say, 'Speak, Lord, for thy servant will hear you if 
you can make me famous or pay me a higher salary than 
Eli pays me here in the temple. Submit your proposition 
and I'll consider it." 

That little boy hugging his precious two-dollar fiddle 
raised his wistful eyes to me as tho I held his life in my 
hands. The tears began to grow in them. 

''Mother, there is your answer. Look in his face. I don't 
know that he will ever make a famous violinist. I do not 
know that he will ever make his salt with his fiddle. But 
I do know he will make his happiness with it. He will be- 
come a very successful fiddler. By all means, let him play 
the fiddle — and take lessons if you can afford it. He must 
play to express his life." 

But the mother was too "practical" to see it that way. 
"N-D ! if he is just going to make a common, ordinary fiddler, 
he has got to stop it. Too many fiddlers around here now,, 
and none of them worth the powder to blow 'em up." 

I wonder if that mother would have said to the birds, "If 
you can't sing like the lark you shall not sing at all." I 
thought of that boy robbed of his fiddle, hating the drudgery 
of the farm, where if Aladdin had been allowed to shine 
his fiddle batteries and brighten his world, he would have 
been happy on the farm. 

I thought of Chapin's film of Abraham Lincoln's father 



42 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

throwing away his book and sending him out to cut corn. 
Little Abe cut the com and then came back to save his 
father from signing the document deeding away his farm, 
for the boy had learned from the book to read what was 
on the paper the illiterate father, in the hands of the 
designing rogue, could not read. Then the father goes out 
to the hollow stump and brings back the treasured volume 
he had thrown away. 
Don't get too "practical." 

* ' My Father 's Business * ' 

A father, a mother and a twelve-year-old boy once went 
up to Jerusalem to attend the Feast of the Passover. After 
they had "fullfilled the days," the father and mother started 
back home with the caravan. They traveled a day before 
the father looked around and asked, "Where is our boy?" 
He rushed back to the mother. "Mother, where is our 
boy?" 

"Why, father, I haven't seen him all day. I thought he 
was up there all the time with you. Why, where can our 
boy be?" 

"Bless me, mother, I haven't seen him since we left 
Jerusalem. I thought he was with you." 

They go distractedly back thru the caravan asking, 
"Where is our boy? Have you seen anything of a twelve- 
year-old boy?" Nobody had seen him. They hurry back 
the day's journey to Jerusalem. I see them going up and 
down Main Street wringing their hands and peering into 
every child's face. 

"Where is our boy? Haven't any of you seen a twelve- 
year-old boy about so high ?" I see them ask at the movies. 
I see them ask it at the baseball game and at the swim- 
ming-hole. But their boy was not there. 



THE INSIDERS 43 

At last they go to the place where many would least 
expect to find a normal twelve-year-old boy, because so 
many have tried to make it the least inviting place for 
him. They go to church. "Why !' there he is ! There is our 
boy — right up there in the temple talking to the doctors, 
the elders and the bishops." 

"Ah! We have found you at last! Why, son, you have 
given us the scare of our lives. We have been looking 
for you everywhere. Why have you dealt with us thus?" 

But the boy who had tarried behind in the midst of the 
doctors, "both hearing them and asking questions," replied, 
"Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" 

What wonderful books and sermons have been written 
about that reply ! It seems as tho the fabric of Christendom 
has been woven around it. What was "my Father's busi- 
ness ?" I am reverently calling it The Big Business of Life. 
His business on earth was to show humanity how to let 
our "light so shine." And as fast as we get into our Big 
Business we find his words true — the kingdom of happiness 
is within. 

Success Not Measured in Salary 

HERE IS SUCCESS — just following these Inside calls! 
HERE IS HAPPINESS— just being ourself ! How suc- 
cessful we are always means how truly happy we are. 
Happiness is our pay and proof of success. We put it in 
our heart, not in our pocket. The world's pet delusion is that 
success and salary are synonyms. 

Success is natural development. 

Happiness is the harmony that comes from natural de- 
velopment. 

Salary is what the world is willing to pay us for it. 

The auto is successful as it runs well. The happiness is 



44 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

the harmonious running of the machinery. Salary is what 
the world is willing to pay to ride. 

A chunk of coal is just as successful as a diamond. If 
we shoveled diamonds like coal, likely the diamond wouldn't 
bring as much as the coal. The diamond gets the big salary 
because diamonds are so scarce people will pay high to wear 
them. 

Salaries Often Confessions! 

Don't be fooled by salaries. They are so often amusing 
and pathetic evidences of the world's temporary blindness 
to true values. The world so often pays high for low ap- 
peals and pays low for high appeals. It pays more to fill 
its stomach than its head and heart. It squanders fortunes 
to dress the body and leaves the mind in rags. It gives 
pennies to go to heaven and dollars to go to hell. See the 
funny pricemarks along the street! Jewels selling for 
junk and junk getting jewel prices. Fools in limousines 
and kings afoot. Shakespeare begging for bread and chorus 
girls in lobster palaces. Esaus trading their birthrights 
for the mess of pottage. The sensual yells, the spiritual 
whispers. 

Not so long ago Charley Chaplin, film-funmaker, was 
press-agented as getting a salary of a million dollars a year. 
The President of these United States was receiving less than 
a tenth of that. Charley Chaplin ten times as successful as 
the President ? Oh, no ! The world merely pays ten times 
as much to be amused as to be governed. Each was where 
he could be most successful. Put the President before the 
camera and Chaplin in the White House and I tremble for 
the result. Some plenipotentiary would be hit in the face 
with a custard pie ! 

"Bud" Fisher, father of those cartoon twins of trouble, 



THE INSIDERS 45 

"Mutt and Jeff," was reputed to receive $150,000 a year for 
producing them. Many a minister and college professor re- 
ceived a hundredth part of **Bud's'' stipend. Was "Bud" a. 
hundred times as successful as these preachers and teachers ? 
Oh, no! The world will pay a hundred times as much to 
see somebody hit in the head with a brick as to see him hit 
in the head with an idea ! 

No! I'm not scolding: the world. It's a fine old world 
— ^the best I ever lived in. It's so well-meaning, short- 
sighted, blundersome ! It is a primary grade school, and as 
we bump ourselves we get promoted. True values stand 
eternal while today's fever-mists blow away. Don't be 
fooled by the tumult and the shouting on the street. Barab- 
bas is merely being released. All Nature is perfectly suc- 
cessful working for nothing and boarding herself. 

Sure, We Must Take Money! 

We must take money so that we can go on working. I 
take money for my work, you take money for your work. 
The engine burns coal so that it can go on running. It 
does not run to burn coal. We go on eating so that we can 
go on working. But we do not live to eat, we eat to live. 

Money is the BUY-product. Do not get the cart before 
the horse. We cannot be successful if we work for money. 
Those we serve cannot be successful if they do not give us 
money or other effort for our work. We take money to be 
honest to ourselves and to our customers. To give things 
to people, even to our own children, without requiring them 
to render service in return, or its equivalent, is to pauper- 
ize them. When we give to people without requiring them 
to pay, we are as dishonest with them as they are with us 
if they take things from us without paying for them. We 



46 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

get our pay in the joy of giving out, but they can only get 
it in the reciprocal joy of responding. 

No business, in the common acceptance of business, is 
honestly conducted if it does not finance itself. It is not 
honest to the management nor to the patrons. Selling "be- 
low cost" is the most expensive selling. It is selling right 
business methods, attacking stability and teaching dishon- 
esty. 

Churches, schools, uplift associations are not expected 
to finance themselves — often they are failures if they do — 
but in the larger way, their beneficiaries can only develop 
as they attempt to render adequate return. The man who 
thinks "salvation is free," never gets any more salvation 
than he makes effort for. We cannot enjoy the sunshine if 
we do not return gratitude for it. 

Paying for thmgs is teaching us to value things. We 
charge admission to a lecture to help people receive it. They 
get back thru the same hole they give out. The biggest 
kicker generally comes in on a "comp". Nobody ever got 
something for nothing. He had to make reciprocal effort. 
The getting comes in the effort. That is why people who 
have everything done for them are not happy and why 
people who have everything given them rarely amount to 
anything. That is why most "charities" and "help the poor"- 
efforts fail. 

Big Business Is All **C. 0. D.'' 

Pay? We'll have the next two chapters all about the 
wonderful pay we get. It is in our hearts. We get it all 
"collect on delivery." We get it out of our work, not out 
of our envelope. We collect it every moment like the bee 
collects the honey from the flowers, or we are poor collec- 
tors. Even though we are working altruistically, we need 



THE INSIDERS 47 

not fool ourselves by saying, "Some day I'll be rewarded 
for this. Some day I'll be appreciated and thanked." No, 
get your joy while doing it, and balance the books. Let me 
repeat what I say in every lecture: *'Don't wait to be 
thanked; hurry on to avoid the kick! Do your good for 
the joy of doing it, but don't wait for a receipt for your 
goodness; you'll need a poultice." You are fully paid all 
the time, and if anybody stops to thank you, that is so much 
"velvet." Don't expect it, and you'll never miscall this an 
"ungrateful world." 

I am to get some money for this lecture. That is not the 
pay — ^that is merely balancing the books with committee, 
audience, speaker, bureau, printer, hotelman, railroad, 
grocer, tailor, Uncle Sam. I am getting my pay every 
minute in the privilege of discussing these things with you. 

Big Business men believe in getting money without it 
getting them. They know its worth and its worthlessness. 
They known it is a fine servant, but a bad boss. They hold 
their money in their hands as trust funds for humanity. 
And they know the danger of scattering these funds blindly 
over humanity under the alluring guises of much so-called 
charity and philanthropy. They know it is robbing the 
people of making their own effort at self -development. And 
burning incense to their own vanity! 

Highly Paid People 

The mother is drawing the Big Business dividends as 
she bends over the cradle. The painter is getting his pay 
as he cradles his child of genius on the canvas. The author 
is getting his pay fathering the offspring of his life. The 
inventor is getting his pay giving birth to his dreams. 

The highly paid people are the people who tell you, "I am 
in this work because I cannot be content out of it." There 



48 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

is no other real pay, and we must get it now, not ''some 
day." 

One day in Innsbruck in the Tyrolean Alps I studied the 
wood-carvings on exhibition. Those peasants are wonderful 
wbodcarvers. I was standing before one great block of 
wood upon which were carved hundreds of figures of men. 
I was told the carver had worked years producing this piece. 
Presently an American tourist who was trying to "do'* 
Innsbruck in a day, rushed up to the block, gave it one 
glance, and as he rushed away said, "Poor fool ! To waste 
so many years on one carving. He'll never get half his pay 
out of it." 

I wondered if the "poor fool" wasn't the other fellow — 
the one rushing by the block and failing to appreciate it and 
realize that the carver long ago got happily paid in putting 
his life into this masterpiece. 

The other day a great baritone — one whose phonograph 
records, no doubt, are in your parlor — said he did not be- 
lieve there were five musicians in Chicago who make a cer- 
tain amount of money in a year. He named a figure so low 
I was very much surprised. 

"Well, well! I thought musicians were better paid than 
that." 

The baritone said a fine thing: "We are well paid. I 
don't know anybody so well paid as I am. My pay is my 
singing. If I were not paid a cent, I should go right on 
singing. I could not live if I could not sing. I am never 
so happy as when I get before an appreciative audience and 
sing to it." 

The Successful Old Failure 

"I have never succeeded in my life," said an old man in 
the little Nebraska hotel. 
"What do you do?" 
"I am a country schoolteacher." 



THE INSIDERS ' 49 

"Why do you teach school?" 

"Well, I guess because I can't do anything else. I have 
tried to quit it often enough. I have stopped teaching and 
have gone into other lines that promised more money. But 
every time I had to quit it and go back to teaching. I 
couldn't be happy at anything else. I have been teaching 
country school ever since I was twenty, and now I am past 
seventy and am going to teach a country school next 
winter." 

"Sit down, father. I thought I was in a hurry, but I 
have all afternoon for you. This is just wonderful. You are 
really teaching because you have to do it to be happy t 
Please tell me about your work." 

I plied him with questions. Hour after hour he talked. 
The apologetic look left his face, and it began to shine as 
he got over into his playground. He told me of country 
schoolt caching as he had known it for fifty years, of the 
boys and girls who had grown up under his care. He said 
he had found every boy and girl a different problem, but 
he had learned that there is a key to unlock each heart. He 
told of the troubles he had overcome, of the many ways 
he had helped young people to find their "thimbles." He 
said he had discovered there are no bad boys nor bad girls. 
They just had mud on them or the measles. They were 
engines full of steam, but off the track. And as he told me 
how he had won so-called bad ones over, he would wipe his 
eyes, and then I would wipe my eyes. 

"Father, promise me you'll never again apologize for 
being a country schoolteacher. Promise me you'll never 
again say you haven't succeeded. When I think of the 
communities you have brightened, of the colonies of young 
people you have built into the backbone of American citizen- 
ship, I feel it has been a real privilege I have had today oi 
sitting at the feet of a great leader." 

I wish I could say this direct to thousands of school- 



50 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

teachers who minimize their work. One of the greatest 
privileges of life is to be a schoolteacher. It is Hke being 
a father, not to one family, but to a community, helping 
to overcome the failures of unworthy parents. The teacher 
is doing more than anyone else in the community to shape 
its tomorrow. The school is a national fortress, the 
training-camp of citizenship, the cradle of liberty. Put the 
best men and women in charge. 

Winning the "Dirty Dozen*' 

**No bad boys!" What a memory waked as he talked! 
It was of the days of my own schooHng. There was a 
bunch of bad boys — so bad they called us "The Dirty 
Dozen," and we were so proud of the name we laid awake 
of nights trying to live up to it. 

We had a poor little, thin, pale, faded teacher. He 
had consumption, and went about that schoolroom wheezing 
and coughing. He could do nothing with us. The neigh- 
borhood voted we all deserved hanging. One Friday night 
that pale, discouraged teacher said as school was dismissing, 
"Good-bye, children, I am bidding you farewell. I have 
resigned." 

I blush to this day as I remember how "The Dirty Dozen" 
went out on the schoolground, threw up our hats and yelled, 
"Hooray I School's out. Hain't goin' to be no more school. 
Teacher's got consumption. Hooray !" Isn't that just like 
a bad boy the world over who does not like school ? 

But there was more school. - The next Monday morning 
there was a new teacher. I think the schoolboard had 
hunted all over the United States for the finest physical 
animal they could find. He wore long red whiskers, too — 
red whiskers flowing down over his massive chest. 

Monday morning the red-whiskered man stepped up with 



THE INSIDERS 51 

firm and confident, tread and stood beside the desk. "Good 
morning," he said with an innocent smile. "Good morning ! 
I am your new teacher. I have come to teach your school." 

Something told us that was true ! 

He made no rules, made no laws, he posted no "Thou 
shalt nots," but like Theodore Thomas before his orchestra, 
he began to direct, and things went as sweetly and smoothly 
as a symphony. 

He would say to one, "Go," and he would go. He would 
say to one, "Come," and he would come. He did not shout, 
nor bluster. He spoke softly and moved like a great CorHss 
engine. He would say, "That fourth boy down there, Ralph 
Parlette — is that your name ? Well, Ralph, I would speak 
to thee," and I would go right up to him Hke a little lamb. 

All this was gall and wormwood to "The Dirty Dozen." 
Our stock was going below par. This was the first time 
we had been made to obey, and we had never learned that 
"to obey is better than sacrifice." We decided to make a 
sacrifice. 

. Tuesday evening, after two days of obedience, we called 
a meeting of "The Dirty Dozen" back of the woodshed, all 
members present. We drew up resolutions — whereas, 
whereas, resolved, resolved! 

"Whereas, things around here ain't like they used to be. 

"Whereas, the presence of that red-whiskered teacher 
fills our hearts with sorrow. 

"Resolved, that 'The Dirty Dozen' in convention as- 
sembled do here and forever declare that they have no 
future with said red-whiskered brute in yon temple of edu- 
cation." 

Next day I graduated, sine laude. I did not consult 
father about the glad details of my graduation. I wanted 
to be a printer. Next morning I started for school, but 
turned up the alley back of the barn and shot downtown 
to the printshop. I got up on a tall stool at a case and be- 



52 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

gan to set type. How happy I was — happy with a certain 
sense of foreboding that all was not well with my future. 

That afternoon about four o'clock, I heard a firm and con- 
fident tread coming up the printshop stairs. You know 
they generally had the printshop upstairs in the country 
town because the rent was cheaper. The door opened and 
I saw some red whiskers coming thru. 

Coming events cast their red whiskers before. I tried 
to hide, but that schoolteacher saw me. He came right up 
to my case. ''Ralph!" his voice was trembly like, "Ralph, 
what are you doing here? Why have you not been to 
school ? Where are the other boys ? Not one of them was 
at school." 

"I hain't going to school no more. I quit. I'm going 
to be a printer." 

To my surprise, he approved. "Why, boy, that is just 
fine. You are going to be a printer. I am always glad 
when a boy finds out what he wants to do." Right away 
my heart warmed toward him. Everybody else was trying 
to stop me from being a printer. "But, Ralph, you are not 
ready to be a printer. You'll have to go to school and study 
books a good while yet before you can be a good printer." 

I knew better. Down in my stubborn little heart I had 
decided to be a printer right away. That red-whiskered 
man kept on talking. He couldn't see he was not wanted 
there. He told me about his own boyhood. How he had 
come of a poor family and nobody encouraged him to go to 
school. How when he was twenty he worked in a brick- 
yard and could not write his own name. But he waked 
up, went to school, worked his way thru college, and 
now he was so glad h^ had done it. He talked so earnestly 
to me, but I tried not to hear. 

Finally he said, "Ralph, you don*t understand, but the 
time is coming when if I can get you back to school and you 



THE INSIDERS 53 

stick, you will not know how to thank me enough for get- 
ting you back." 

"I hain't goin' back!" I remembered my oath to *'The 
Dirty Dozen". I was slipping tho. 

That red- whiskered man came up closer to me — so close 
I could feel his red whiskers tickle my cheek. "Ralph," 
and his voice was more trembly like, "aren't you coming 
back to school? Don't you know if I can't get my boys 
back to school I'll be a failure and have to go away? You 
are my boys. I love my boys. I have come here to help 
you. Come on back, Ralph, we haven't got acquainted yet." 

Think of a schoolteacher talking that way! Loves his 
boys ? Why, I thought all a schoolteacher wanted to do was 
to lick the boys. But he kept talking right on, his voice 
more trembly like, and you know yourself when anybody 
talks that way you just feel like jelly inside. "All right, 
(boo hoo!) I'll come back to school." 

Of course! AU "The Dirty Dozen" went back. The 
strike was called off. That man won us. He became our 
great playmate, and we became his select bodyguard. We 
would have waded across the Atlantic for that man, and not 
even have rolled up our pants. If anybody had said a word 
against that red-whiskered man, he would have had to 
settle with "The Dirty Dozen" en masse. 

School was different after that. The books were radiant. 
A new note had been struck. That man inspired me to go 
on working my way thru school and college. 

One day years afterwards in a western city I saw an old, 
bent man who used to wear red whiskers. "My old teacher ! 
It has come true. You remember the day you took me back 
to school when I had run away to the print shop? Well, I 
don't know how to thank you enough for what you did." 

Again his voice was trembly like. "O, boy ! I don't need 
to be thanked. It is grand to find you again. I didn't get 



54 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

much money back there, but I got great happiness in help- 
ing you boys discover yourselves. If I had my life to live 
over again I'd be just what I was — a schoolteacher." 

Analyzing Our Motives 

"Pay as you go," is a fine motto. 

Get your pay as you go, is a finer motto. That is the fine 
art of living. Collect the pay every hour and balance the 
books. Make every transaction complete, with no strings on 
the future. No trading stamps to be cashed in afterwhile. 

I have heard many people say, "when I get older I shall 
enjoy the fruits of my labors." But I have never seen one 
of them enjoy these fruits, for when they got old enough 
their enjoying machinery had worn out. 

Enjoy it now ! They are like the farmer who retires and 
moves to town to enjoy himself. He soon dies, for his bat- 
teries quit shining. 

The man who used to be the greatest pusher in his home 
town, who gave so much of his time and money to improve 
the town and help the people, is now out of everything. He 
used to say, "Some day the people will thank me for this. 
Some day they will appreciate me." But now he says, "I'm 
done trying to serve the public. The people do not appre- 
ciate what you do for them." He looked Outside instead 
of Inside for his pay. 

Are you trying to do good to others? Do you expect it 
to make you popular? Do you expect to get some advan- 
tage or promotion in return? Then sooner or later your 
house of happiness is going to totter. 

Once I led a church choir. Hence these gray hairs. I 
pay tribute now to a soprano who was the embodiment of 
faithfulness. Every rehearsal night, every service, she was 
in her place. Many a time I saw her come thru rain or 



THE INSIDERS 55 

storm to be in her place. We could always depend upon 
Helen, for she used to say, *lt is the love of God in my 
heart that keeps me going." The preacher preached about 
her, and often held her up as a shining example of faith- 
fulness. 

One day a stupidly brilliant idea entered my undiplomatic 
head. I had found another fine soprano, and I invited her 
to come to the choir to sing beside Helen. I wanted to con- 
gratulate God on having twice the praise, and Helen on 
having somebody to sing beside her. 

You know the rest. The first time Nell sang beside 
Helen, was the last time Helen ever came to choir. So far 
as Helen was concerned, God wouldn't get any praise unless 
she could be the entire praise department on the soprano 
row. And Helen said that I was her enemy and plotted to 
put her out. I shall never lead any more choirs. I prefer 
the trenches or work in a munitions factory or something 
not so uncertain. 

I wish I could save many an "unselfish" church and 
prayermeeting worker from future bitterness. I wish I 
could make many a community leader look inside and 
analyze motives. I* wish I could show them their real joy 
is not in selfishly monopolizing. 

Let the plumb-line of truth go clear down where it will 
into our motives. It will save us much suffering and dis- 
appointment afterwhile. Some frankly admit, "I am doing 
this just to get the money."- They are far more honest than 
the person who loudly announces, "I am doing this just for 
the good I can do." 

Most likely, both are fooling themselves. 

Indeed, when I hear even the minister, the evangelist, the 
reformer, the social uplifter, the missionary or any other of 
the recognized world forces for good announcing so loudly, 
"I am only doing this for the good I can do my fellow man," 



56 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

I wonder if he is not trying to shout to drown inward mis- 
givings of just why he is doing it. The snake of selfishness 
must be crawling into his Eden and he is trying to camou- 
flage it. Altruism does not need a press-agent. 

If he is really doing it for the joy of doing it, he is so 
happy he has no need to explain why he is doing it. 

When our business is paying us plenty of money, and we 
are getting ahead, getting popular, bowed to and famous, we 
discover that we are doing wonderful good. We see new 
and undreamed of virtues in our work. We see it very 
necessary to the world. We really get to thinking we are in 
it just for the great good we are doing. The saloonkeepers 
even were able to get up an entire book of reasons why the 
saloon was a national, necessary blessing. 

Stop the salary or other selfish interest. Would we see 
so much good in it? That is the test. 




9' 

THESE ARE GREATER GAMES 



CHAPTER IV 
TURN WORK INTO PLAY 

And Find Your Playgrounds 

I AM GETTING DOWN on work. I refuse to work. 
Work is the curse of Cain upon the race. I beg of you 
never work. If you have ever been guilty of work, 
stop it. If you know anybody who does work, go to him 
and plead with him to stop this pernicious, life-shortening 
practice. Only the Outsiders, the Little Business men, work. 
The Insiders, the Big Business men, play. 

Do I mean to stop our activities ? Oh, no, I mean to in- 
crease them, naturalize them, turn work into play. Work 
breaks people down ; play builds people up. "All work and 
no play makes Jack a dull boy. But all play and no work 
makes Jack an artist! 

Nature doesn't work. The birds, the flowers, the trees, 
the animals, do not work. And yet when it comes to pro- 
ducing the perfect product and the bumper crops, you'll 
admit we cannot beat them. The lilies "toil not, neither do 
they spin." No matter how big a crop of anything grows, 
they just naturally produce it without a struggle, strike or 
groan. Everything in nature just lives and produces its 
perfect product as the joyful expression of living. 
57 



58 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

Difference Between Work and Play 

Do you remember when we were children we ran our legs 
off and yelled our little yellers out, just playing. We played 
till we dropped dead tired asleep. Then we recharged our 
batteries, jumped up and lammed at it again. Don't you re- 
member the first day of skating when we skated ourselves 
stiff for days afterwards, and that first day of swimming 
when we swam every muscle sore. Hooray! Wasn't it a 
"great and glorious feeling"? 

Nobody could have hired us to work that hard. It wasn't 
work, it was play! 

Just look at those blessed little rascals playing over there ! 
See that boy having such a time playing horse astride a 
broomstick. See that other boy playing carpenter and 
building a house of sticks. And see that other one playing 
store. Yes, and just see that little girl making mud pies on 
broken dishes, and that other one rocking a rag dollie to 
sleep with all the cares of a household upon her slender 
shoulders. 

Those little Human Flashlights are surely "lit up"! 

But just look over on the other side of the road at those 
grownup Human Flashlights at work. You can tell with 
the naked eye that they are not playing, they are so dark 
and gloomy. They are having such a hard time metering 
out their energy and watching the clock. But really you 
know they are not working half so hard as those children 
who are not working at all! 

One man is driving at horse and he is saying, "This is a 
dog's life." Another man is building a house and he says, 
"My boy shall never be a carpenter." One girl is in a 
kitchen over there and wailing, "I am beating my wings 
against a cage." 

What is the difference between play and work? Don't 



TURN WORK INTO PLAY 59 

you believe that when we play we WANT to do it, and 
when we work we HAVE to do it ? When we play we are 
Insiders and when we work we are Outsiders. When we 
play we get our pay in our hearts. When we work we think 
we get our pay in our pockets. When we play we get our 
pay every minute in the joy of shining our batteries, and 
when we work we think we'll get it Saturday night. 

Play is expressing ourself. Work is repressing our- 
self — repressing, depressing, oppressing, compressing, sup- 
pressing ! 

God pity the one who thinks he is paid in his pocket, for 
he is never paid. We have to take money for our shining 
in order that we can go on shining. We have to be honest 
with the other fellows and pay for our living. But no mat- 
ter how much we get in our pockets, it will never make us 
happy, save as it enables us to shine. We cannot buy happi- 
ness; we have to live it. 

The Greater Gaines of Life 

We are all children yet, but most of us have forgotten 
how to play. That is what is the matter with us. Yes, 
we are children, maybe grown more selfish, cranky, re- 
pressed, dulled, discouraged, rheumatic and bent. We look 
so stem, perhaps, but that is just the funny bark casing on 
our Human Flashlight. Down underneath there is some 
of the child's heart or we wouldn't yearn to be a child again. 

If a little boy can have so much fun with a broomstick 
horse, oughtn't he to have more fun as a grownup boy with 
a real horse, if he has horse batteries ? 

If a little boy can have so much fun playing train, oughtn't 
he to have more fun as a grownup boy with a real train, if 
he has train batteries? 

If a little boy can have so much fun building a house out 



60 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

of sticks, oughtn't he to have more fun as a grownup boy 
building a real house with real carpenter tools, if he has 
build-house batteries in him? 

If a little girl can have so much joy making mud pies 
on broken dishes, oughtn't she to have more joy afterwhile 
in a real kitchen making apple pies and pumpkin pies, if she 
has pie batteries in her? 

You know I am right ! 

What wonderful memories we have of those precious 
play-minutes at recess ! An hour seemed like a few minutes. 
We never could get time enough to play. What glad memo- 
ries of marbles and ball and blackman ! Of "hide-and-go- 
seek" ("One ! two ! three ! for me !) ! Of "blindman's buff," 
"prisoners' base," "aunty-over," "crack-the-whip" ! And the 
gentler games of "button," "ring around the rosey," "Lon- 
don bridge is falling down," and such! Then the "kissing 
games" at the parties and taffy-pulls ! What a book any of 
us could write about the fun we had in the "good old days" ! 

On our playground rich and poor, high and low, black- 
smith's child and banker's child were on an equality — if 
the home influence didn't intrude. All played a hard, happy 
game to win. We were fierce competitors, but the moment 
anybody fell, all the rest of us sprang to help him up. 

The child's playground is the perfect democracy. 

I shall not discuss professional baseball, athletics, golf and 
the other popular games. I am enthusiastically for them all 
as they stay clean and give relaxation. 

But far greater games are the grownup games of driv- 
ing horses, running trains, building houses, making pies and 
rocking cradles. Far greater games are running farms, 
playing fiddles, writing books, teaching school, peddling 
peanuts, shining shoes and preaching sermons. The play- 
grounds simply expand from the front door-yards, the 
school-lots and back-alleys to take In the homes, the shops, 



TURN WORK INTO PLAY 61 

Stores, offices, farms, the community, the world. This world 
is planned for a playground, not a "vale of tears." 

Some Great Players 

Just look around the community. Don^t you see very 
many different kinds of "business men"? There is a man 
who tells you, "This is the worst town on the map." He is 
generally helping to make it so. There is a man that tells 
you, "People never used me right." Do you notice he never 
uses people right ? Do you notice a man who says, "Every- 
body's out for the coin. Beat 'em to it. What's there in 
it for me ? I'm not in business for my health. Come across 
with the dough!" 

Poor little human runts ! They are not in business at all. 
They are just robbing themselves of the joy of life, and 
turning themselves into embalmed cash-registers. 

But here and there is a man running a store who tells 
you, "I am proud of my store and have a lot of fun run- 
ning it. I like to sell good goods at the right prices and have 
people say the goods are right, just like the man that sold 
them to us." 

That man has found his playground. His business is to 
go on playing and enlarging his playground. This Human 
Flashlight idea makes it clearer. This man has found his 
"thimbles" — some of them, at least. He is shining some 
of his ability batteries and he is shining some of his Life 
batteries of Faith, Hope and Love. He loves his job and 
the service he gives. Go on, Mr. Merchant, enlarging your 
playground ! 

Don't you believe we have touched upon a big fact there ? 
That we must shine our Life batteries along with our ability 
batteries if we are to brighten our business ; else it is cold 
and dark. 



62 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

Do you believe that alleged merchant who keeps his place 
placarded with flaming "selling out below cost," "undersell 
everybody," "cheapest store on earth" signs can be happy ! 
Can he love the job of unloading shoddy goods upon ig- 
norant customers? Is not the real Big Business man a 
teacher — ^teaching his customers clean, fair play? 

There is an unhappy banker with a shifty eye and a metal- 
lic laugh, who never tells you anything above a whisper and 
looks furtively around as he whispers it. He never thinks 
outside of dollars. But there is a glorious soul in other 
banks who looks you straight in the face and smiles a whole- 
some smile. He is the man the farmer comes to for finan- 
cial advice and credit. He is the man the manufacturer 
seeks for counsel. His constant game is making every 
dollar do its utmost with safety to the interests of all. He 
is one of the great builders of the community playground as 
he extends credit where it encourages honesty and thrift and 
withholds it where it encourages speculation and dishonesty. 
He has found his playground. 

You can pick out the great community players, just by the 
way they appreciate their opportunity. There are petti- 
fogging lawyers who haunt the courthouse corridors to fat- 
ten like vultures on the unfortunate. But there are wonder- 
ful players who say, "I am a lawyer because I couldn't be 
anything else. The law is the noblest profession in the 
world. I am proud to be a lawyer. I am just as happy-— 
yes, happier — when I keep people out of lawsuits than when 
they get into them. I am happy when I can show them the 
right and get them to settle the case out of court." That 
lawyer becomes the honored and trusted friend of the com- 
munity. Fathers leave this earth comforted in the knowl- 
edge that their families and dependents will be cared for by 
such a trustee. He stands like a Gibraltar among men. He 
is a great player on a great playground. 



TURN WORK INTO PLAY 63 

When the world learns to play instead of work, it will 
make crooked business as unpopular as it recently made 
crooked baseball. 

I meet a good many newspapermen with a cynical view 
of life. Small wonder they are cynical, for they rub up 
against the weak, sordid, selfish sides of humanity, perhaps 
more than any other profession. But that shouldn't dim 
their Life batteries. Here and there is one who says, "I 
love the business arid couldn't be happy at anything else. "I 
have the chance to talk to more people than anybody else 
and I can make them think right. It's a lot of fun, this 
newspaper game, and I am father confessor to the whole 
community." That newspaperman has found his play- 
ground. When you say "There is no news in the paper 
today, be mighty glad the newspaperman did not print all 
he knows. There would be news enough to blow up the 
community. A newspaper is known not for what it prints, 
but for what it refuses to print. It is one of the great 
umpires in the community game. 

Sometimes I meet a schoolteacher who says, "You see, I 
am only teaching temporarily. It is merely a stepping- 
stone." I want to say, "Hurry up and step!" Teachers and 
preachers have a hard time getting a material world to pay 
for spiritual ministries. But no professions are more 
wonderfully paid. The farmer can well have joy in growing 
material crops, but the teacher and preacher can have a 
far greater joy cultivating spiritual crops. And the real 
ones are never temporarily at it, but joyfully tell me, "I 
couldn't do anything else and be happy. Fd do this work 
even if I had to pay for the privilege of doing it." I bow 
low before such great players and say, "Go on and enlarge 
your playground, and happy the ones who play with you !" 

I have lived in hotels in all parts of the North American 
continent for twenty-five years. I have seen and suffered 



64 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

in a thousand hotels where the managers had apparently 
no pride nor interest in keeping their homes for the 
public comfortable, clean and inviting. I have never felt 
very sorry for myself, for I could escape next day, but I 
have felt a real sorrow for the keeper content to live in the 
neglect and disorder of it day after day. But here and there 
I have found a hotel so clean and tidy and with such a warm 
welcome that I have rejoiced to be in it. It was a great 
playground for the manager, who found his happiness in 
this line service to his guests. Such a hotel is a blessing to 
the world. 

So I could go on calling the roll of community players. 
Most of the great players never get into type. They peddle 
papers, shine shoes, wash dishes, drive drays and shift the 
scenery behind the scenes. This morning I had my break- 
fast in a Chinese restaurant. That Chinese boy who waited 
on me smiled and seemed so happy at the privilege of bring- 
ing me my breakfast, that I enjoyed my breakfast more 
than for many days. That "Chink" has a great playground. 
I am going back there for dinner today. He ministered to 
me quite as helpfully as the minister did to his congrega- 
tion last Sunday in the pulpit. 

I Am Learning to Play 

I am just beginning to learn how to play again after all 
these years. I used to work very hard at having '"careers" 
and other diseases. I spoke often of my work before men, 
accounting it a great virtue. I would say, "I am so busy — 
so busy!" "I am just overwhelmed with work." "I have 
to work night and day." "I haven't a minute I can call my 
own." 

I felt so flattered when people would say, "Poor man! 
He is such a hard worker. He is breaking himself down !" 



TURN WORK INTO PLAY 65 

So I posed as a martyr to duty. I carried the world on my 
shoulders like another Atlas. What would the world ever 
do if I should break down? Like Chanticleer I wondered 
how could the sun ever rise if I did not crow at two every 
morning ? I worried for myself and took in plain and orna- 
mental worrying on the shares for others. 

Now I smile at those performances. Now I know that 
the busiest of us wastes most of his time. Just rushing 
around isn't getting somewhere. The pup is very busy chas- 
ing his tail, but isn't getting anywhere. When a man is 
"too busy" to do something, he is confessing he isn't inter- 
ested in doing it. We have time for everything our heart 
calls to do. The busiest man can take on the most new load. 
The world doesn't rest upon anybody's shoulders, nor does 
it particularly need anybody. But we need the world and 
its problems for our playground. We are not saving the 
world, we are saving and developing ourselves by saving 
others and serving others. The man who takes himself 
seriously is the funniest joke. 

I am getting so I can play ten to twenty hours a day with- 
out getting too busy. I pine for more jobs I can play with. 
I have exchanged my baby rattlebox for a typewriter, and 
rattling it is a lot more fun. I used to play "two old cat" 
and run the bases, but playing lecture circuits and running 
for trains is a lot more fun today. I used to play at being 
an editor when I was a boy, but it is more fun today being 
a gray, grizzled editor with real printers and presses. 

I had a lot of fun writing this book. I hope you have 
some fun reading it. If not, go play some game you like ! 
Isn't it a wonderful discovery that all the world is just a 
playground? Here's for a finer game today than you and 
I have ever befdre played! 

If we need very many vacations to rest up from our work, 
we are not very good players. Our job ought to rest and 



66 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

refresh us. It ought to be a continual vacation from work ! 
I beHeve in vacations. I beHeve in vocations and avocations. 
I believe in doing many different things to develop all our 
batteries that we do not become lop-sided, which brings un- 
happiness from suppressed development. More of this in 
another chapter. 

When we learn to find our holy-day every day in our job^ 
we will not need to have so many holidays as we have them 
today. Concerns will not need to knock off work, shut up 
shop, upset calculations and keep things in a turmoil for a 
week that there may be a day too often of dissipation and 
excess, called ''celebrating a holiday" which is too often 
an un-holy-day. 

What Great Players! 

Yes, all play and no work makes Jack an artist. For play 
is art. We lose our sense of labor and find joy in shining. 
Every work of art is a love-letter. Art-work is heart-work. 

Michaelangelo no doubt played as a boy, but his greatest 
playground was the dome of Saint Peter's. I can think of 
Shakespeare playing marbles, but I think the immortal 
bard played his greatest games in producing "Hamlet," 
"Macbeth" and "Merchant of Venice." If he had said, "I 
shall write 'Hamlet' to make myself famous and get a lot of 
money," do you think a line of it would have survived him ? 
Immortal things cannot be done save as they are warmed 
by the light of the Faith, Hope and Love batteries, and you 
can't start them by dropping a dollar in the slot! Great 
visions shine out in great works. Selfish, sordid motives are 
the lack of vision, the absence of light. 

Is not that why popularity kills a good deal of art ? Some- 
body writes a book that becomes maybe a "best seller." His 
publishers say, "Hurry up and write some more master- 



TURN WORK INTO PLAY 67 

pieces so that we can go on selling them and making more 
money for you and us." So he may go on and become an 
Outsider instead of an Insider, his genius losing the light 
of his great Life batteries and producing a shelf of inferior 
stuff. 

A magazine recently said of Thomas A. Edison: ''A 
marvel of concentration, energy and endurance. He has re- 
ceived patents for almost a thousand inventions; has de- 
signed, built and operated huge plants for manufacturing 
the products of his genius ; and now at seventy- three years 
of age, he is actually looking for other worlds to conquer, 
* * * * His energy is almost literally sleepless, for it is 
his custom to take only a few hours rest at night." 

Edison long ago turned his work into play, and he rests 
all the time. He says three or four hours sleep is enough 
for anybody, that we sleep too much, and when we get more f 
civilized we'll not sleep at all! When we learn to play as 
well as Edison plays, perhaps we'll not need any more sleep 
than he needs. You generally notice it is the one who gets 
the least out of life, who produces the least, that needs 
the most sleep. "Please go 'way an' let me sleep," is the 
song of the dull shiner. 

You remember when the world wanted to honor Edison 
at the San Francisco Pan-American Exposition he hadn't 
time to stop playing long enough to go and get the honor ! 
They sent a train specially to get him, to whisk him 
triumphantly across the continent to be the hero of Edison 
day and be welcomed by Luther Burbank at the portals 
while the multitudes waved flags. And when that special 
backed up to his laboratories, he was too much absorbed to 
get aboard! "Please come and be a hero!" they pleaded. 
Finally they prevailed on him to get aboard, and he sank 
down in his old regimentals and went on with his notes. 



68 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

His wife wired ahead "Cheer up! I'll have him dressed 
up by the time we get there." 

That is real play! 

Twenty years ago when Billy Sunday began his unique 
evangelistic career, he seemed to work so hard the people 
said he would kill himself in no time. These years he went 
right on killing himself. The other day I saw him kill him- 
self three times in one Sunday. After the third suicide, as 
he jumped off his big platform before thousands of people, 
his collar melted to a rag, his face glowing with joy, I 
grabbed his hand. *'Billy, aren't you having more fun up 
on that big platform preaching, than you ever had playing 
ball for 'Captain Anse' ?" "You betcha !" he said. "This is 
the greatest game I ever went up against I" 

George Cohan is such an enthusiastic player that he has 
been known to play on the stage a full week in an actor's 
part, and each night after the show he would coach another 
company until the small hours of the morning. After that 
was done he would write on a new play until daylight! 
George says he never takes a vacation to rest up, because 
he is rested all the time — it's all vacation ! 

** Sadie," the Artist in Dough 

"Yes, but a woman doesn't have the same chance. She's 
shut in a kitchen over a hot stove, and can't get out to ex- 
press herself. This is fine talk for a few, but it won't work 
in a kitchen." "> 

Then why not express right in a kitchen? Don't you 
think a flower would try just as hard to blossom in a 
kitchen as in the front yard? Not long ago I stopped in a 
boarding-house in a little New York state village. The re- 
ception-room was so neat and tidy that I wasn't surprised to 



TURN WORK INTO PLAY 69 

hear somebody singing farther back. I followed that song 
back to the kitchen. There I found a woman working over 
a very hot stove on a very hot day and singing. 

"My dear woman, come out of that hot kitchen this 
hot day ! Give me a cold lunch, and be happy." 

"But I'm happier right here," she replied. "I'd really 
rather cook than eat." That woman was one of the hap- 
piest players I have ever known. Her kitchen was as neat 
as her parlor, every pan and pot bright and shining and 
in place. She began to tell me about the things she was ^ 
cooking and got me so interested I said, "Pin an apron on 
me and let me get at it." 

That dinner! I wish you could have sat down with me. 
When you talk about your works of art, I'll talk about the 
dinner of "Sadie," the artist in dough. I never knew that 
baked beans could be such a poem or that pumpkin pie could 
come so near the human heart. A good many years "Sadie" 
has sung in that kitchen and fed the boys who worked in 
the town and boarded with her. Now they have grown up 
and gone away, many of them to their own homes, and she 
shows you their pictures and the loving letters her boys 
write her. There are no crowsfeet in "Sadie's" face, be- 
cause there is no drudgery in her housekeeping. May her 
tribe increase ! I wish there were a million artists in dough, 
don't you? 

The Aristocracy of Workmanship 

I believe the carpenter out there building a bungalow can 
be just as happy an artist as Michaelangelo on the dome of 
St. Peters, if he puts himself into the game as whole- 
heartedly and finds the same joy and pride in his work. 

I bow low before the finished producer anywhere. There 



70 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

is an aristocracy of achievement thru all human effort. This 
hasty, commercial age has done much to destroy it. There 
was once a carpenter who built the great frame houses to 
last for generations that reflected the skill and pride of the 
Gothic cathedral builders. He built with love, art, skill and 
honesty, and would stand aghast at the flimsy structures 
thrown together in rows today. There was a furniture- 
maker, a cabinet-maker, who built a table or chair with 
the care and honesty he would want a watch built. He 
would cry out at the cheap veneered stuff that today has too 
often taken the place of his choice handicraft. 

I sat in the dining-room of a Southwestern hotel the 
other day and noted how the "marble" pillars were warping 
and cracking and peeling as unseasoned soft wood insists 
upon doing even under imitation marble paint. I 
wondered how many dishonest impulses such an environ- 
ment has inspired. I go into a "bargain store" and see the 
loads of shoddy stuff of every description that people are 
lugging home, and do not wonder at their slow progress. 

One appreciates the fine old examples of bookbinding, 
bootmaking, woodworking, as he does the creations of 
painter, sculptor, author and composer. There is even a 
repair man who has made his fame for doing a good job, 
who will not undertake anything unless he can do it just 
right, who scorns shoddy, sloppy work. This is the age of 
hurry, when the cry is for profits more than products. 

Better one good thing than ten poor things. Better the 
workman that "needeth not to be ashamed." He can point 
to his products as the Roman matron pointed to her chil- 
dren, "These are my jewels." 

Yes, every great book is a love-letter from the author. 
Every great painting, building, business or loaf of bread is 
an expression of the love of the player for his play. 



TURN WORK INTO PLAY 71 

Learning to play is the fine art of living. Playing is ex- 
pressing and developing ourselves. It is shining our bat- 
teries and being warmed and lighted by them. So the Big 
Business of Life is FINDING OUR PLAYGROUNDS 
AND ENLARGING THEM. 




CHAPTER V 

'*WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?** 

More Self -Expression tlie "Labor Problem" 



RC 



OT ! THERE'S NO PLAY IN MY JOB. IVe got 
to work hard all day to make a living at a job I 
hate." "I've got my nose at the grindstone." "I 
want to do other things, but I have no chance." "I am old, 
broken down and discouraged. Too late for me." ''I love 
my job, but I am not as happy at it as I used to be." 'The 
older I get, the unhappier I get." 

I am glad these objections have come up. We are just 
at the place in this visit where they answer themselves. 
These are the questions the great masses of toilers and 
tired professionals keep asking. 

Everywhere today the cry is for MORE WAGES, LESS 
WORK and SHORTER HOURS OF WORK. Why? 
Because we believe these will make us happier, more suc- 
cessful, give us better food, clothes and homes, and help us 
to get ahead. 

Surely we all should have good food, clothes, homes and 
everything necessary for our success and happiness. I be- 
lieve all these things are for everybody just as fast as we 
get ready for them. But we have already learned that 
72 



"WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" 73 

merely getting things will never make us happy. You 
notice the baby that cries and cries for things, gets more 
peevish and fretful the more you give it, because it doesn't 
know what to do with them after getting them. 

You and I are all just people, no matter where we work 
— whether upstairs or down, whether in the front office 
or the back warehouse. We are not things nor machines 
nor "dumb, driven cattle." None of us will ever be truly 
happy and contented just getting more wages, less work and 
shorter hours of work, any more than a bird or animal with 
the call of the free world can be happy in a cage, no matter 
how much food and things you pile around it. 

As long as we have the ability to feel unhappy, we have 
the ability to feel happy, AND CAN FIND HAPPINESS. 
We simply need to bring happiness into our job. JUST 
SHINE MORE, and the light and warmth that come into 
us and go out of us do the Aladdin lamp enchanting. But 
how? 

Tie Your Job to the Game 

That turn-work-into-play idea is right. If we have a job 
we hate weVe got to warm ourselves up playing games we 
do love until we find ourselves warming up to this hated 
job. Or we must make it auxiliary to the big games we do 
love, and stay at it until our further development may 
naturally take us out of it. 

Suppose we boys were having a great game of ball and 
the teacher should say, "Boys, we'll have to stop playing 
ball until we can build a fence around this playground to 
keep the cows out. And we'll have to build a bridge over 
the creek to get to it. And we'll have to get some money to 
pay the rent on this ground so we can go on playing next 
month." 



74 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

Would there be any growling? Not a growl! All of us 
would stop playing and shout, "Lead us to some work!" 
We would rush around town asking everybody, "Can't you 
give me a job at something to make some money to fence 
in our ballground and build a bridge to it and pay the rent ? 
Just anything I can do. I'll carry a hod, dig ditches, sweep 
streets." And we'd love the hod-carrying, the ditch-digging, 
the street-sweeping, wouldn't we ? It would be a part of the 
big game of playing ball. Hooray ! every lick is a tally ! 

And suppose you girls were playing keep-house and make- 
pies, and mother should say, "Girls, you'll have to stop 
playing long enough to get some money to pay the rent 
and get some more dough for your pies." 

Would you girls growl? Not a growl! You would stop 
playing and shout, "Can't you give me a job at something 
to make some money to pay the rent and get more dough ? 
Just anything I can do. I'll sweep, scrub, peel potatoes, 
wash." And you'd love the sweeping, scrubbing, potato- 
peeling, washing, wouldn't you ? It would be a part of your 
big game of housekeeping and pie-making. 

But if all of us boys and girls had to carry hods, dig 
ditches, sweep, scrub, peel potatoes, wash, and work at the 
other rent-raising and dough-getting jobs, with no big games 
to play, wouldn't we talk just like the army of toilers ? We'd 
have our "nose to the grindstone." We'd get dull and dis- 
couraged, and hate our jobs, no matter how much money 
or how short the hours we got, because we had no big- 
game interest warming and lighting our efforts. 

Warming Up and Lighting Up 

Not much wonder there is unrest among the toilers and 
jaded ones, all of them Human Flashlights and only shining 
a few batteries to get the rent and the dough ! Sitting on the 



"WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" 75 

lid of the other batteries struggling to shine ! Small wonder 
we either dry up or blow up ! WE MUST PLAY ! We 
must find our playgrounds. 

See that man pulling a lever all day, just drilHng five 
holes in a plate and then drilling five holes in another plate, 
and doing that same thing hour after hour and day after 
day. There are millions of people doing just such monoto- 
nous things year after year, with the rest of their batteries 
unused. You ask the foreman if that man is happy. "Why 
isn't he? He's getting big wages and full time." 

No! That man isn't happy and he isn't well-paid, no 
matter if he works in the most modern, sanitary, efficient 
factory in the v/orld, if he isn't doing more with his own 
outfit of batteries than that. He's drying up inside — going 
dead and cold. He has no big game, big interest in life. 
He is liable to get a brain-storm and throw a monkey- 
wrench into the very machinery that feeds him. The surge 
of the suppressed Hfe within is the fertile soil of unrest 
for the agitator, the radical, the bolshevik. He may blindly 
attempt to destroy a civilization evolved by centuries of 
progress that should be the finest playground for him if 
taught the games he can play. We can't cure inside trouble 
with outside havoc. 

Why destroy the playground? Why not learn to play 
on it? GET IN THE GAME! 

This is the trouble with the multitudes of discouraged men 
and women everywhere. They must learn how to play. 
They must take the drudge out of drudgery by warming 
up and lighting up their other batteries. They must LIVE 
as well as MAKE A LIVING. 

All of us must shine our Life Batteries as well as our 
Ability Batteries. We must get some new interest, any- 
thing to warm and light up. Killing the grouch in the morn- 
ing and shining a loving greeting across the breakfast table 



76 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

may be a fine start. Starting down the street with a cheery 
greeting for everybody may raise our temperature and in- 
crease our luminosity. Right around everyone of us are 
chances to play and express more of ourselves. Maybe we 
have unused batteries that will shine at making garden, 
raising flowers or pets or chickens. DO IT ! Maybe we need 
to take flowers or pie to a sick neighbor. DO IT ! Maybe 
we need to fish, swim, boat, camp or play golf. DO IT! 
Maybe we should read, write or study at odd moments. 
DO IT ! Maybe it is home-making, saving, thrift. DO IT ! 
Maybe it is working with tools, inventing, constructing. 
DO IT! Maybe it is whittling a toy, carving a statue, 
modeling in clay. DO IT ! Maybe it is playing in a band or 
ballteam, singing, composing, teaching. DO IT! Maybe it 
is getting interested in community work, social service, 
schools, churches, better citizenship. DO IT! 

And as you DO IT, your old job grows brighter, because 
you are shining more. In each community are a few doing 
so many things outside of their bread-and-butter business. 
They take the lead and bear the burdens for all. They work 
hard, work overtime, but it is all play and privilege. They 
need no sympathy, for they should be congratulated. They 
are the happily paid players. Get in the game with them 
and see your work become play. Community building team- 
work is one of the greatest games and we can all play it. 
We aren't real citizens till we line up for this. 

Great multitudes of workers find that when they get mar- 
ried and establish a home of their own, they are far hap- 
pier. Their home becomes their playground and their job 
is just the dough-getting, rent-raising game. Every load 
the hod-carrier heaves up the ladder then is lighted with his 
life batteries of Faith, Hope and Love to some degree. It 
means food, shoes and shelter to the ones he loves more than 



"WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" 77 

himself. Every monotonous effort of the mother in the 
home may be lighted with love until duty becomes privilege. 

Getting the Inside Urge 

My old horse used to get tired, discouraged and broken- 
down pulling the wagon away from home. The more I 
pushed and whipped him, the more abused and downtrod- 
den he felt. He was a strong advocate for shorter hours 
and longer hay. But the minute I turned and began to drive 
toward home, that minute he was a different horse, tho 
pulling the same wagon on the same road. He would stick 
his ears forward, shake his tail and just light out for the 
barn with visions of oats inspiring him. I didn't need a 
whip, for the whip was now inside. To turn work into play, 
we simply transfer the whip from OUTSIDE to INSIDE. 
We get a goal and an urge. 

If a man didn't love whisky, you might force him to 
drink it and he would feel mightily abused. You might 
squirt it down his throat and he would rebel. But if a 
man loves whisky well enough he will tramp a mile or ten 
miles to get a drink of "hair tonic" and sing along the way ! 

If a man didn't love his wife and children, he would feel 
burdened to support them with alimony. But if he loves 
them, he finds it a wonderful game just doing anything 
that will get them food and clothing. 

So as we light up and warm up with new interests, our 
"daily grind" becomes a daily game. We jump at our daily 
tasks like we were tackle on a football team. As we play 
the game fair, the other fellows have to play fair, and any 
injustices and inequalities soon iron out. We just can't have 
trouble unless there are two sides making the trouble. The 
first principle of play is FAIR PLAY. We find ourselves 
growing younger, for age isn't years; age is getting old 
and dead in the heart. 



78 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

Children are not lazy. You never saw a lazy child, if it 
was well. If they are not working with all their hearts and 
strength, it is because their hearts aren't in their work. 
Many a boy has been driven away from a "good home" 
because he was driven to work without being given the 
inside urge. The same children that dawdle rebelliously 
over work forced upon them, will joyfully work their 
heads off at building a playhouse in the backyard. Then 
why not turn workhouse into playhouse ? Get them to shin- 
ing and they will do it with a shout. 

You remember Mark Twain's delicious story of how Tom 
Sawyer got the boys to struggle for the privilege of paint- 
ing the fence. I never worked harder in my life than the 
day when as a little boy a groceryman permitted me to 
help him move his stock half a mile to a new store-room. 
That groceryman understood boys, and he made fifty of us 
boys see what a game and privilege it was to be permitted 
to carry the candy and good things to eat. He never paid 
us a cent. I really think we would have felt insulted if he 
had! 

1 don't believe there are any intentionally lazy people. 
They simply haven't discovered that shining brings more 
happiness than inactivity. 

More Great Players 

Some of the happiest people I know work all day at fenc^ 
ing their playgrounds and paying the rent and upkeep, and 
play their bigger games just a little bit between-times. But 
their days are warmer and brighter. 

For a thousand years the Welsh people have worked in 
mines, fields, kitchens, singing and then coming together in 
their eisteddfods, where they contest with each other in sing- 
ing solos, duets, quartets, choruses, and in speaking, writing, 



"WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" 79 

painting and other arts. The winners then go to the next 
higher contests to meet the winners from other districts. 
Finally these winners gather in a national eisteddfod to 
contest for national prizes. These years the Welsh people 
have gone about their daily work happier because of their 
singing games, and have become famous as a nation of 
singers. 

I know a man who sings while he lays stone all day. He 
is happier than most stone-masons because he is interested 
in a wonderful electrical workshop he has in his cellar. 
After supper you generally find him down there experi- 
menting with electrical devices. He puts every spare 
moment and spare dollar there. He hasn't become as famous 
as Edison, but he has had just as happy life on his electri- 
cal playground. I don't know whether he has ever got back 
a dollar from his electrical game, but I know he has got 
big dividends of happiness. 

I think of Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, the English boy who 
worked in a mine and studied books as his big game on the 
way to and from the mine. Now he has become one of the 
most famous preachers and orators in the land. And I am 
thinking of the miner in the little town who came out of 
the mine with his face covered with coal-dust, to greet me. 
His batteries never called him out of the mine, but he de- 
veloped his community around the mine into a great play- 
ground for himself. He sold the tickets for the lyceum 
course. He ran the Sunday school. He led his fellows in 
almost every altruistic move. Honor to Cadman — ^and equal 
honor to the other miner! 

The secret of great men is that they not only find their 
playground, but they find other playgrounds, and go on 
enlarging them. Thus their lives grow brighter and warmer 
all around. J. Pierpont Morgan was a great financier, but 
he was just as great an art collector, his enthusiasm for one 



80 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

making steam for the other. You find the greater the man 
the more he is interested in everything. This is the age of 
specialists, but nobody can be a good specialist who does 
not put the power of a great, symmetrical life behind his 
specialty, else he dries up into a freak. The headlight of a 
railway engine specializes on lighting the track ahead. An ' 
oil-lamp or candle is sometimes used, and it makes a little 
gleam ahead. But put the electric current into that head- 
light and it floods the track for a mile ahead. There are too 
many unhappy specialists running thru life lit with a candle 
instead of the dynamo of their full abilities. 

I found a remarkable street railway superintendent in a 
western town. I think I discovered why he is such a whole- 
some, rounded, kindly man who has never had a strike. 
His men work with him, not for him. "Here is my play- 
ground," he said as he led me back of the car-barn into a 
field where some pet deer came bounding up to him. "Here 
is some more of it." And he showed me rows upon rows 
of cages on the other side, where he had more of his pets — 
foxes, raccoons, coyotes, wolves, rabbits, eagles, bear and 
about everything else Noah took with him. Affection and 
kindness radiated from that man. He was the man who led 
his community over the top in the war drives. He was in 
front and back of every move for the good of the com- 
munity. "You do a lot of things you are not paid for." I 
knew what he would reply — "Yes, but I get much of my 
best pay from doing things that I don't get paid for." 

I found a printer and editor in DeKalb, Illinois, who has 
developed one of the most unique playgrounds around his 
printshop. Herbert Wells Fay has such a creative battery 
in him that he didn't believe making Indian arrowheads 
was a lost art. He went on studying them until he has be- 
come skilled in making them either out of stone or glass. 
For years he has collected until today he has one of the 



"WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" 81 

greatest galleries of photographs and prints of great men. 
He has a thousand different pictures of Lincoln, showing 
over two hundred different sittings. He has collected over 
two million portraits. 

Workers Must Play or Clash 

Why, here we are in this play talk right on the thing 
underneath the whole labor problem! Frank Hodge, the 
secretary of the English miners federation, says: 

"Workers' control is a means and not an end. Work in the 
modern industrial world is unpleasant for the majority of workers. 
They will find their expression as human beings outside the work- 
ing hours — in the use of leisure for family life, education, recrea- 
tion, a hobby. Control they will use to get efficient management 
and machinery with which to shorten hours to the minimum 
which is consistent with the essential work of high production. 
Control, they wish, to save themselves from the waste and inse- 
curity and long hours of the present system, which leaves no secure 
and creative leisure. A minimum of work consistent with a pro- 
duction which will give sufficient commodities for a good life for 
all workers — they will use control to obtain that. But control 
of itself will never be an answer to the instincts thwarted by 
standardized machine industry. The answer will be found outside 
of working hours." 

Thank God, the workmen see that they must sweeten with 
play or grow sour. They do not want merely the means of 
life, but life itself. Industry in its modern desiccated form 
does not afford opportunity for complete self-expression. 

Our Salvation Depends Upon It 

And here is the great statistician, Roger W. Babson, say- 
ing the same thing— PLAY OR DECAY. In a recent ad- 
dress he said: 



82 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

"By nature man likes to produce. Our boy as soon as he can 
totter out of the door starts instinctively to make a mud pie. 
When he gets a little older he goes out in the backyard and 
gets some boards together and some shingles and some paper and 
builds a hut. Just as soon as he gets a knife, do you have to 
show him how to use it? No. He instinctively begins to make 
a boat or an arrow, or perhaps something he has never seen. 
Why? Because in his soul is a natural inborn desire to produce 
and a love and a joy in production." 

Then he said that something had happened. Our indus- 
trial system has taken out of the boy as he grev^ up that 
desire to produce. 

"Why? I don't know. I simply say it happens, and the salva- 
tion of our country today and the salvation of your city and the 
salvation of the industries that you represent depend upon DIS- 
COVERING SOMETHING which will revive in man that desire 
to produce, and that joy in production which he instinctively had 
when he was a small boy. 

"INCREASED WAGES WILL NOT DO IT. SHORTER 
HOURS WILL NOT DO IT. The wage workers must feel right 
and the employer must feel right. It is all a question of feeling. 
It is feelings that rule this world, not things. * * * 

"Two captains of industry were standing at the bridge at 
Niagara Falls looking at those falls, and one of them turned 
and said: 'Behold the greatest source of undeveloped power in 
America.' The other turned and s?id: 'No. The greatest source 
of undeveloped power in America is the soul of man.' " 

Mr. Babson said that we have gone to seed on methods 
and mechanical efficiency, and have neglected inspiring the 
largest factor in production — ^the human factor. I believe 
we are discussing that "something" that employers and em- 
ployees are beginning to see— SELF-DEVELOPMENT. 
My flashlight picture makes it clearer. The Human Flash- 



"WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" 83 

light must be developing both his life and his ability bat- 
teries. What isn't developing in his daily work must be 
developed outside of it. Then the worker is playing on his 
daily playground, and manifests his joy in production both 
in and out of "work hours." He becomes an engine himself, 
not just a machine to be run with a belt and a boss. 

Inspire and Educate Workers 

The employer finds his playgrounds. He must be just 
as interested in finding playgrounds for his employees. Most 
''welfare work" so far misses the point. The employees do 
not want to be patronized but recognized as co-workers, 
and co-players, with equal opportunities to play the game. 

The false god of our civilization — that success is in getting 
things, must be overthrown. Everyone of the thousands 
employed in a great plant must be taught that success is for 
all alike in SELF-DEVELOPMENT. The real welfare 
work must be the cultivation of this great human garden 
of workers — cultivation as carefully and intensively as the 
cultivation of a vegetable garden or orchard. If the workers 
are not cultivated, the weeds choke ; the pests, parasites and 
birds injure and stunt ; the vines fall down, the plants sprawl, 
growth is wrong or hindered. Wrong ideals and wrong 
thinking must be corrected with right ideals and right think- 
ing. Each worker must be shown how to develop himself 
to the maximum ; then he has reached the pinnacle of 
success. 

The real welfare work is a crusade for universal self- 
development. Everybody must shine and succeed. Every- 
body must learn how to play. Each one of us has a natural 
monopoly of Being Ourself. Only one person in the world 
can Be Ourself. And Being Ourself is being as successful 
as all the people in the world can ever hope to be ! 



84 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

It does not matter in the least what kind of batteries we 
have, nor how many. It does not matter whether we have 
a talent to dig a Panama Canal or a city drain. It does not 
matter whether we have a talent to run a Waldorf-Astoria, 
a boarding-house or a bungalow. It does not matter whether 
we have a talent to run a Marshall Field's or to clerk in a 
corner grocery. It does not matter whether we have the 
talent to be a Caruso or a choir singer. It does not matter 
whether we have a talent to work for our country as Presi- 
dent or private. 

But it does matter that we shine what batteries we do 
have. That is our happiness. Paderewski can be no happier 
at his piano than you can be at yours. The big boss giving 
orders can be no happier than you and I obeying them, if all 
three of us are letting our own batteries have as full play. 

The astronomer can discover no more of heaven with 
his telescope than the blind man on the street-corner can 
without eyes. 

Only one thing about a talent matters — that it be used. 
Shine it and we are happy and grow. Isn't it amusing how 
you and I have envied other people's talents, when ours 
alone could make us happy? We have wanted other peo- 
ple's places, when getting them would have made us very 
unhappy and out-of -place. 

Not Playing for the Gate Receipts 

When did you stop playing? When you turned a flip- 
flop for the fun of it you were playing. But when you got 
to turning flipflops for the gate receipts, you got to work- 
ing. When you got to turning flipflops so you could get 
your name in the paper and get recognized as the greatest 
flipfloppist in the land, then you got into sad, hard, thank- 
less, worrisome work. We need gate receipts. But the 



"WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" 85 

mistake was made when we got to thinking our pay was 
in the gate receipts or in the big type instead of in the 
joy of flipflopping. 

The community is just a larger playground. Business, 
industry, commerce are just larger games with finer toys 
and tools. Let us not take ourselves so seriously. Not one 
of us is indispensable. Take any of us out of the community 
and the world will wag right on. Every job in the com- 
munity and the world is just another opportunity for us to 
have a good time, play the game, kick up our heels, clear 
our brain and let our light shine. The ocean does not need 
the fish ; the fish need the ocean. 

The Conductor Who Cheered Us 

There is no job that cannot be made luminous with the 
light and warmth of our life batteries. I used to think 
a minister was a man who stood up in a pulpit and preached. 
Bless them all who minister that way! But I am finding 
ministers everywhere as I am warmed by the light of their 
lives. Let me tell you about a great minister on his rail- 
road playground. 

A hundred mad, wet, bedraggled, half-frozen people wait- 
ed at a junction-point. There was no operator there, so we 
could not tell how late the train was. The station was too 
small to hold the half of us, so more than half of us stood 
out in the sleety storm of that raw January day in the 
mountains of West Virginia. What we said about rail- 
roading in general as we shivered in that storm must have 
kept the recording angel sending out for more ink. 

When that belated train pulled into the station, it was 
about two hours late, and a hundred cold, wet, abused peo- 
ple climbed aboard. We wanted to fight somebody. Each 
of us had a chip on his shoulder. One word would have 



86 THE* BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

started a riot. The cars were damp and uninviting. The sun 
didn't shine — ^there wasn't any sun! We hadn't been used 
right. The babies cried. Miserable little brats ! Why will 
women bring their children out on a day like this! Life 
wasn't worth living. God had resigned! 

A miracle happened. The car-door opened and a con- 
ductor entered, with a face like a sweet apple-pie, all lit 
up. He looked over that pandemonium of hopeless souls and 
smiled ! "Good morning !" he said. ''Glad to see you ! Folks, 
we're sorry to be so late, but it is a hard run in this storm 
and we are doing our best. Please be patient with us. 
Tickets, please." 

Some of us decided to live awhile after that! "Good 
morning!" said that conductor as he started down the aisle 
and shook hands with the first man who handed him a 
ticket. "Going to Jimville ? Well, we'll be there about lO 130 
if we stay on the rails." 

"Good morning! Glad to see you!" he said to the next 
man as he punched his ticket. "Good morning, glad to see 
you !" he said with a handshake to each person. "Mother, 
what a pretty baby !" And that squalling infant stopped and 
began to crow I You should have seen that conductor smil- 
ing on everybody and treating the passengers as tho they 
were guests in his parlor. 

You could hear the chips dropping from the shoulders 
of everybody. I rubbed my eyes. Am I dreaming or dead, 
and is this the millenium express ? The snh began to shine, 
the birds began to sing, the babies — ^blessed little angels ! — 
began to crow. And God reconsidered his resignation ! All 
because one man was shining his Faith, Hope and Love 
batteries. 

There was an old brute — another old brute — sitting beside 
me. He was so mad, he had his face hard set and his 
mouth pulled down. He hadn't been treated right and this 



**WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" 87 

conductor wasn't going to soft-soap him. That wasn't any 
way to run a railroad — make a man stand out there in the 
storm two hours, and now his rheumatiz would be back on 
him. O, how he would tell that conductor where to get 
off ! And presently that conductor came smiling up to him. 
"Good morning, glad to see you!" And that old brute's 
face slipped! He looked up at that conductor and smiled 
back, "Good morning! Glad to "see you, Mr. Conductor!" 

I sat there glad to be alive and on that train. And I 
thought, I'm going to thank that conductor now while he 
can hear it, and not wait and put it into the resolutions of 
respect. Friends, let's organize a tell-it-to-them-now so- 
ciety. I went up into the smoker, where he had his tickets 
spread out on the front seat. "Mr. Conductor, I want to 
thank you for what yoa did." 

"What did I do?" he asked, with the smile still in place. 
I think that was about the finest of it all. He had been treat- 
ing people on his trains like this so long, he didn't know he 
had done anything unusual. If I had done that, I would 
have put it in the papers next day! 

"Man ! When you came into that car this morning it was 
like Daniel going into the lions' den. We wanted to crunch 
your bones, we were so mad. But you came in and smiled 
and told us you were glad to see us, and it sounded like you 
meant it. I am telling you what everybody on this train 
feels. We feel good and happy and we love you, old man! 
Go on every day doing that. I have lived on trains for 
twenty-five years, and I know what it means to have a warm 
handshake like that. You are a minister to travelers." 

His eyes began to moisten. "Mister, you are spreading 
it on pretty thick. But I guess you are right. The people 
like to be treated that way, and when people get on my 
train I feel as tho they were part of my family. Just see 
what they did to me the other day." 



88 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

He pulled out a watch — one of the finest I had ever seen. 
"Look inside." Inside the lid I read the engraved inscrip- 
tion — ^how this watch had been presented to him by the 
officers, employees and patrons of that railroad in apprecia- 
tion of his kindness in the public service. I learned that all 
up and down the division the people had spontaneously 
made up a purse for this watch, to give him. Nobody was 
allowed to give over a dollar and little children took pennies 
out of their banks to give to that man so kind to them on 
tlie trains. 

The Joy of Radiation 

That is why I said, DO IT ! Warming up and lighting up 
is part of this great game of life. What a blessing to himself 
and all around him is the man at the ticket-window, at the 
postoffice window, over the counter, over the dinner-table, 
on the street or in any other place of pubHc or private 
contact, who can cheer as well as serve. And what a handi- 
cap is the grouchiness of the person, be he ever so efficient 
otherwise, who is deficient in radiation! 

This love-game, for that is what it is, is one of the finest 
we can play, and we can play it everywhere. It warms the 
giver and receiver. There are even two ways of saying, 
"No.'* One way turns you pleasantly back, the other way 
rouses your anger. 

I used to wonder why so many people were so grouchy 
towards me. It has taken me many years to discover that 
it was because I was grouchy towards them. 

These are the little games that make the big game of life. 
Many of us are like the man with millions who is willing to 
give great amounts for great causes, but goes around hold- 
ing tight to his nickels and dimes, unheeding the thousand 
calls for his small change. We yearn to do great things for 



'WHY AM I NOT HAPPIER?" 89 

the world, but we do not see that some of the greatest work 
for ourselves and others is giving out the daily nickels and 
dimes of good cheer and helpfulness. 

Really, the world needs our many small gifts more than 
our occasional millions. There are only a few great struc- 
tures, but they are built of many little bricks. We build 
our life of the daily nickels and dimes. The big twenties 
and fifties are not much worn, but the tired pennies and 
dollar bills are the active currency of the life circulation. 

Ever so many think success and happiness are things we 
are going to get afterwhile. Ever so many think we have 
to die to attain happiness. It is a problem of right living, 
not of right dying. Success and happiness are not goals 
ahead, but heartgleams along the way. We can be just as 
successful today as we can ever be. 

When is a bird a success ? When it gets longer feathers ? 
When it gets stufifed? When is a railroad train a success? 
When it gets to New York or Chicago? Is not a bird just 
as successful today as it can ever be? Is not a train just 
as much a success at the smallest country station or any- 
where along the track when it is making its time, pulling 
its load and doing what it was built to do? And is not the 
slowest freight train as much a success as the swiftest ex- 
press? Would not each be a failure trying to be the other? 

Go On Growing 

"Why am I not happier?" Because we've stopped de- 
veloping. The plant is green while it develops, but if it 
stops developing, it shrivels. So the job we were happy at, 
may now be too small for us as we grow, and we must 
find larger expression in a larger job or more jobs. We 
cannot be as happy this year doing just what we did last 



90 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

year. We must do more, or we stagnate. We must grow 
or growl. 

The most tasteless, unsatisfying existence is just "work- 
ing for a living." It is working for a dying. It is slow sui- 
cide. It is keeping the body living and letting mind and 
heart die. Let us change "working for a living" to living 
for a work! 



ALL THESE BA TTERIES ARE IN US 

Life Batteries] l^j fAbility Batteries 

0^ fQ\t\ Hope and V—JV-t^; — < afObsc!V(2ion,iiniHttion. 
Love that give us qwce j ^ M| ^ j Imention, etcjifjat qWe 



and power J ■■ I us fitness an* sk\H.. 

EDUCATION IS RNOINGlllXNDMAKmGTHEMSHIME 



CHAPTER VI 

EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 

It Is Finding and Shining All Batteries 

EDUCATION? Why do you bring that up here? 
Didn't we finish our education back in the schools? 
We are still in school. All our Hfe we are in school. 
We start in the cradle, go thru the schools of books, and 
then go out into the greater schools of real life. All the 
world is a school. 

I can best understand what education means when I pic- 
ture people as Human Flashlights with these rows upon 
rows of life and ability batteries. Discovering these bat- 
teries and making them shine is the real education. E-duco 
— / lead out. Then to be completely educated, all the bat- 
teries in us must shine. I do not find anybody completely 
educated, do you ? We develop some sides and neglect some 
sides. We can see the lopsidedness in others so easily — and 
the lopsidedness in ourselves not at all! The man who 
knows books and the man who knows cattle pity each other. 
The woman who knows fashions and the woman who knows 
philosophy cry out at each other. 

The worst lopsidedness is ability development and lack 
of life development. To shine as a great artist and fly 
91 



92 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

into hysterical rage — to have that celebrated "artistic tem- 
perament" — is hard on everybody. To have brilliant mental- 
ity and no conscience is to be poorly and dangerously 
educated, tho one has his room papered with diplomas. 
Diplomas are only symptoms of an education — indications 
that some battery or other in us has been hunted for. 

We used to think that "expression" meant elocution — 
"speaking pieces" and learning to gesture. Glory be ! We're 
discovering that all life is expression. We are all trying to 
express the same story of living thru our different batteries. 
One paints a picture, another makes a pie. One writes a 
book, another carves a statue, another sings a song, another 
builds a barn. One teaches school, another preaches a ser- 
mon. You can tell how well educated anybody is by watching 
him express himself. You can tell by his talk, his laugh, 
his clothes, the way he ties his necktie, the kind of a tie, the 
way he shakes hands, the way he treats his family, the way 
he treats strangers, the way he acts when watched — and the 
way he acts when not watched ! 

Education that only develops our Ability batteries to 
make money and pile up things is all rig*ht so far as it 
goes. But it is only a start. The great education is the life 
development. Education that does not make us happier is a 
failure. 

"Warmer" and ** Colder'' Studies 

I am mightily interested in the public schools in every 
community. They are such important gateways to the 
greater life-schools. They are great gardens of self-dis- 
covery. Children must study arithmetic, geography, gram- 
mar and the other branches, but they must study most of 
all the great tree-trunk — ^themselves. Children must look 
outside, but far more they must look inside. The great 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 93 

education for each one is not in knowing the world so much 
as in "Knowing thyself." The great teacher is more an in- 
spirer than a perspirer. He is more important than the 
buildings, for brick and mortar do not make a school. Mark 
Hopkins on a log is the real school. Communities lavish 
money on school buildings and pinch pennies in getting 
teachers to run them. Better send the child to a school in a 
barn, run by a real teacher than to a marble palace run by 
somebody teaching out of a book "from page 68 to page 95 
tomorrow." Good teachers are cheap at $5,000 a year where 
poor teachers are dear at any price. 

Young people, do you find some of your classes in school 
easy and some of them difficult? Do you get discouraged? 
Did anybody ever call you a "blockhead"? Don't you be- 
lieve it. There are no "blockheads." They might call a fish 
a "blockhead" if it was in a singing class of canaries, and 
all the birds might laugh at the fish. But just put that class 
in the water, and then the fish laughs at the canaries, for 
then they are the "blockheads." 

So we are all Human Flashlights, each with a different 
outfit of batteries that we must shine, and then each of us 
is perfectly successful. Now in the ordinary schools today 
there- are courses of study that seem necessary for all to 
take. We are all studying arithmetic and grammar and 
geography. Some of us find arithmetic calling "warmer" 
to us ; we just love mathematics, because we have a mathe- 
matics battery lighting up. But some of us find ourselves 
"colder" in the arithmetic class, we can hardly keep up, 
because we haven't any mathematics battery, or it hasn't yet 
developed. We find geography or grammar "warmer," be- 
cause we have that kind of batteries in us. 

Go ahead and do just the best you can, and don't get dis- 
couraged. We have to do many things we do not like to do, 
in order to get ready to do the things we like to do. We have 



94 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

to learn the tedious multiplication table before we can revel 
in the joys of mathematics beyond. We have to struggle to 
walk before we can frolic over life's playgrounds. But most 
likely our big, happy games afterwhile will be along the line 
of the batteries calling "warmer" to us. Specialize on them. 
If you love mathematics or history or languages, go on 
studying more and more mathematics or history or lan- 
guages. If music, or drawing or tools or plows call "warmer" 
to you, go on specializing on music or drawing or tools or 
plows. 

Confessions of a "Blockhead" 

I was a "blockhead" in the early school years. No study 
appealed to me. My early schooling was a tragedy. I would 
try my best, but it was always my worst. I was slow, timid, 
sensitive and short-sighted. I couldn't see the blackboard 
and was too timid to ask help. I would take my books home 
at night and plead to stay out of school. I cannot remember 
one word of encouragement or sympathy I got at school 
as a little boy. But always I heard, "You're too dull ! You 
can't get it." I never got up to recite but what that would 
ring in my ears, "You're too dull ! You can't get it." You 
know, that helped greatly! 

I had failed so often and had been put back in my classes 
until I sat at a desk so small I couldn't get my knees under 
it, and they stuck out on each side. There was a little 
"smarty" right beside me. Why do they put a "smarty" 
right beside a "blockhead" — ^to rub it in on him ? He could 
get it in a minute — right off the bat, while I would "muft" it 
— generally get it about the week after. Many a day I had 
my geography up over my face. The geography was up- 
side down ; I was trying to hide my tears. I used to think I 
would be hung for my stupidity. If stupidity were a capital 
crime, I surely would not be giving this lecture ! 



i 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 95 

That awful day before the night when I didn't sleep any ! 
The teacher blew up with a loud noise. He got so mad and 
red in the face. He told me something over and over and 
I couldn't get it. Then he said, ''Now, Ralph Parlette, I'm 
going to tell you just once more." Something inside of me 
said, "You're too dull. You can't get it!" And I didn't 
get it ! Then he thumped me on the head. "O, you block- 
head! Your head is made out of wood. I'm not going to 
tell you anything more. Tomorrow I'm going to bring a 
gimlet and bore a hole into your wooden head, and then 
write it down on paper and put it in the hole. That is the 
only way you'll ever get anything inside your head." 

I looked up at him like a chunk of putty. If he had asked 
me my own name I could not have told him. I went home 
sobbing, wild with fear. "Don't ! Don't let him ! Don't let 
him bore a hole in my head !" I cried all night, I trembled 
for days afterwards. I do not think I ever got completely 
over the scare of it. 

Stop and think! Think of any man telling a slow, dis- 
couraged boy he was going to bore a hole in his head! 
That man was not a teacher. He was the "lowest bidder." 
He had never found his "thimble." He lacked the first 
essential for a teacher — he did not love his pupils. He could 
not get a job in any school in America today shoveling coal 
into the kindergarten furnace. As I got older I pitied that 
man more than myself. He was an unhappy man, made no 
friends, and when they buried him there were no tears shed, 
as the poor old misfit was laid away. 

O, what a grand discovery I made later on — ^that there 
were things in this world I could do — things that "smarty" 
couldn't do ! He had one equipment of batteries and I had 
another. His shone brilliantly in the schoolroom and I 
couldn't get a flicker out of mine. 



96 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

I was so cheered when I read that wh^n Thomas A. 
Edison was a boy in school, he was so dull that the teacher 
said to his parents, "Take that child out of school. He is 
addled." I so strikingly resembled the great inventor in 
just one way — I was "addled" in school. But Edison cer- 
tainly has discovered a few batteries since that time! 

Shilling "Blockheads" 

There was a diplomatic "blockhead" in my college classes. 
He could not tell you anything about the lesson, but he 
could fill in the time with such interesting discussions of 
other things that you would forget about the lessons. I 
never heard him recite. When it came his turn he would 
gracefully engage the professor in some debate or argu- 
ment that would take up the time. 

I am not arguing for Joe's methods. He was able to "get 
by" with it, tho, right along. We rather pitied him — ^then. 
We do not now, for he is the head of a manufacturing plant 
where he handles men with the same grace and diplomacy 
he handled the professors. Indeed, after Joe got out of col- 
lege, he was himself a college president for a while, until 
this great plant took him, heading the college on his sheer 
ability to converse and smile endowment thousands out of 
plutocratic pockets. 

History is heavy with just such cases of "blockheads" 
who did things after they found their "thimbles." The 
other day I wrote a letter to one of the greatest preachers 
and schoolmen in the land. "Doctor," I wrote, "I want 
to put a chapter on 'blockheads' into a lecture on Big Busi- 
ness. Would you mind telling me about your early school- 
days ?" 

It was an awful and impertinent thing to do, but he 
came back with several pages of joyful confession of his 



EDUCATION^ THE BIG BUSINESS 97 

sorrowful and slow beginnings in a celebrated Eastern uni- 
versity. He admitted he was very, very slow. The reports 
on him in many branches grew steadily worse. His mathe- 
matic grades were melancholy in the extreme and running 
to minus. He could not get on speaking terms with a loga- 
rithm nor look upon the binomial theorem with the least 
degree of allow^ance. 

The faculty were for letting him go, but one professor 
held out for him. Finally that professor lost hope, and then 
the faculty with tears in their eyes (and joy in their hearts) 
called that dull mathematician upon their classic green car- 
pet and broke the news to him that after long and pra5^er- 
ful deliberation they had unanimously come to the conclu- 
sion that his case was hopeless, and perhaps a change of 
environment might be more conducive to his educational 
development, might it not? 

Canned ! That dull mathematician thought his future was 
pretty black. But he found his "thimbles" one by one. He 
found he could read deeper into human nature than into 
geometry. He found he had an eloquent tongue and a gift 
of leadership. He became a preacher and wherever he 
preached the people crowded to listen. He moved to larger 
and larger churches and filled them. One day a vision of 
a school fired him. He preached a sermon memorable in 
the annals of the pulpit — ''What I would do if I had a mil- 
hon dollars." A man sat in that deeply moved audience. 
He had the millions and was wondering what to do with 
them. The sermon made him see. He rushed up to that 
preacher after the sermon. 

''Do you mean that? If you had the million would you 
build and run that school?" 

"Yes." 

"Here's your million !" He gave him more millions, too. 



98 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

They made a great school. That preacher now gives his 
life to it. 

Meanwhile that fine Eastern university now numbers that 
erstwhile "blockhead" among "our honored sons"! "And 
they lived happily ever afterward," as the story-books say 
at the close. 

* * Pind-the-Thimble ' ' Schools 

Then let us begin right in the schools to find the batteries 
in these Human Flashlights. Have them do the best they 
all can at the regular all-around courses of study that are 
fundamental, but make SELF-DISCOVERY the great daily 
game. Have the playground all around the schoolhouse, 
and make the schoolhouse itself the great place for every 
pupil to play "find the thimble" and strike out for the 
greater life playgrounds beyond. Make the school hours so 
interesting and such fine games that the children will come 
shouting into school as they now go shouting out of school. 

Vocational guidance is the great forward step. The 
schools must cooperate with the homes in saving this world 
from its clogging of misfits. There aren't any failures — peo- 
ple are just in the wrong place. That school teacher Inisfit 
that was going to bore a hole in my wooden head might 
have made the happiest kind of a woodworker. That dull 
clerk might become the livest kind of a writer. That care- 
less stenographer might become a great shopkeeper. That 
botch tailor might be a great electrician. 

So let us go on filling our schools with books, but let us 
also fill them with microscopes and telescopes, and work- 
benches and lathes and sewing-machines and cook-stoves. 
Put in typewriters and printing-presses and cash-registers 
and shovel-plows. Let the young folks see all the games of 
life and listen inside to the batteries that wake to the call 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 99 

of this and that, just as the note of the outside tuning-fork 
brings a sympathetic response from the strings attuned to it. 
Strike all the tuning-forks in school. 

The little child wants to be a policeman, a milkman or 
keep a candy-shop, because it only gets to see these activi- 
ties. Let it see more of the world's activities that it can 
more quickly find its own batteries without blundering thru 
the years. 

"Flashliglit Clubs'' 

That is why I have had great fun organizing "Flashliglit 
Clubs" of the youngsters. I believe that the idea is right, 
and big enough to grow into a movement. The plan is to 
enroll the young people into a club that holds regular meet- 
ings to develop this understanding that they are Human 
Flashlights and to help them find their batteries. Sometimes 
they have called their organization the Aladdins. A course 
of reading on vocational guidance is arranged. The meet- 
ings are addressed by ministers, doctors, lawyers, bankers, 
merchants, writers, musicians and all others available, each 
telling about his or her own work, and its possibilities. The 
club makes excursions to stores, banks, mills, mines to see 
the world's work and further waken the members to what 
they want to do. These excursions become outings eagerly 
looked forward to, and the club in its visits is shown many 
attentions as the guest of the mill or store. 

Children up to twelve years are Junior Flashlights. The 
Senior Flashlights are beyond that age. A badge has been 
devised, a flashlight shining, and in the light above it, the 
motto of the club, "I CAN !" This badge is exchanged for 
a golden one as the degrees are passed. 

Degrees — that is interesting. We get merchants, bankers, 
lawyers, doctors, printers, garage-men, electricians, farm- 



100 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

ers, the more the merrier — to become Beacon Lights for the 
Flashlight Club. If a young Flashlighter thinks he has 
printer batteries in him, he goes to the printer Beacon Light, 
and gets a chance to have the run of the printshop. They 
show him how to do things, give him odd jobs to do so far as 
it does not conflict with the child-labor laws, and let him see 
if he likes the printing business. If the printer Beacon Light 
thinks the youngster has real printer batteries irr him, he 
presently gives the applicant a certificate which is brought 
back to the club and the happy Flashlighter has won his 
first degree and a better badge. He has found a battery. 

The good isn't all to the young Flashlighters. Getting the 
grownups over town interested in the children's develop- 
ment is just as important. The children in such a town can 
depend upon getting a chance. More interest in schools, 
parks, playgrounds, civic morals is awakened. That town 
becomes a good place for a child to grow up. The Beacon 
Lights begin to realize they are examples and beacons for 
the young. The whole town becomes a larger school for the 
children. And the schools get what they need. 

Don't Mistake Your Vocation 

Phineas T. Barnum, the great showman, was much more 
than a showman. He had a profound understanding of life. 
He says in his autobiography : 

"The safest plan, and the one most sure of success for the young 
man starting in life, is to select the vocation which is most con- 
genial to his tastes. Parents and guardians are often quite too 
negligent in regard to this. It is very common for a father to 
say, for example: T have five boys. I will make Bill a clergy- 
man; John a lawyer; Tom a doctor; and Dick a farmer.* He 
then goes to town and looks about to see what he will do with 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 101 

Sammy. He returns home and says, 'Sammy, I see watchmaking 
is a nice, genteel business ; I think I will make you a goldsmith.* 
He does this, regardless of Sam's natural inclinations or genius. 

"We are all, no doubt, born for a wise purpose. There is as 
much diversity in our brains as in our countenances. Some are 
born natural mechanics, while some have great aversion to ma- 
chinery. Let a dozen boys of ten years get together, and you 
will soon observe two or three are whittling out some ingenious 
device, working with locks or complicated machinery. When they 
were but five years old, their father could find no toy to please 
them like a puzzle. They are natural mechanics; but the other 
eight or nine boys have different aptitudes. I belong to the latter 
class. I never had the slightest love for mechanism. On the 
contrary, I have a sort of abhorrence for complicated machinery. 
I never had ingenuity enough to whittle a cider-tap so it would 
not leak. I never could make a pen I could write with, or under- 
stand the principle of the steam-engine. 

"If a man was to take such a boy as I was, and attempt to 
make a watchmaker of him, the boy might, after an apprenticeship 
of five or six years, be able to take apart and put together a 
watch; but all thru life he would be working uphill and seizing 
every excuse for leaving his work and idling away his time. 
Watchmaking is repulsive to him. 

"Unless a man enters upon his vocation intended for him by 
nature, and best suited to his particular genius, he cannot succeed. 
I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find the right 
vocation. Yet we see many who have mistaken their calling, from 
the blacksmith up (or down) to the clergyman. You will see, 
for instance, that extraordinary linguist, the 'learned blacksmith,* 
who ought to have been a teacher of languages ; and you may 
have seen lawyers, doctors and clergymen who were better fitted 
by nature for the anvil or lapstone.'* 

The Calling of Biddy Brahma 

Once I had a Brahma hen that had a call to sit. I have 
never known a Brahma hen that did not have a loud and 



102 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

chronic call to sit. I argued with Biddy. "Why, Biddy, look 
at the price of eggs. Produce and help me Hft the mortgage. 
Biddy, you are not called to sit; you are short-circuited." 

I spake more and more harshly to her. She went right on 
sitting. She would sit in the manger, and I would throw 
her out. Then she would go over into the granary and sit. 
I would reach my long pitch-fork under her and throw her 
clear out in the barnyard. Wherever she lit, she would go 
right on sitting. It didn't seem to matter where she sat, 
just so she was shining her sit batteries. 

One day I caught her sitting on an old boot, and my heart 
smote me. Who am I to stand between this humble creature 
and her call ? "Biddy, forgive me. You shall sit." I fixed 
up a fine new sittery. I got a barrel that had never been 
sat in. I fixed hay in the nest and tried to make it as home- 
like as possible. I could find no chicken eggs, and as Biddy 
was saying, "Hurry ! I am called," I took the eleven duck 
eggs we had in the house and put them into the nest. 

"Go to it, Biddy !" And Biddy went right into that barrel 
and spread herself over eleven duck eggs. The glad light of 
anticipatory motherhood came into her face. Did you ever 
study the face of a sitting hen — from a safe distance? 

"Leave it all to me," she said. "Depart in peace. I'm on 
the job, and 'watchful waiting' will do the rest." 

What I am telling you is exactly what happened, only 
the dialog was not in English. Day after day as I passed 
the barrel I would look in and ask, "Hello, Biddy, how are 
you getting along?" She would always reply, "O, just fine! 
You just wait and I'll show you eleven of the finest chickens 
you ever saw." 

Chickens ! I didn't argue with Biddy. I never argue with 
an old hen! 

It came the twenty-first day, but still Biddy held on, with 
faith unshaken. I think it was the twenty-eighth day, when 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 103 

I looked down the walk and there was a grand homecoming 
celebration and free street parade at noon. A procession 
came proudly marching up the garden walk from that bar- 
rel, Biddy leading and that fuzzy family following. 

"Cluck, cluck ! Quack, quack, quack ! Cluck, cluck ! Quack, 
quack, quack!" The procession halted at the kitchen door. 
"Let me introduce you to my latest family," said Biddy. 
"Aren't these the finest chickens you ever saw?" 

Love is blind. "Chickens? Why, Biddy, look at their 
noses ; look at their feet. Those aren't chickens." Biddy was 
mad in a minute. I saw her gather them under the apple- 
tree. "Look here, children, did you hear that awful man? 
He has questioned your identity and my veracity. You are 
my good little chickens, aren't you?" 

Every one of the fuzzy little things replied, "Yes, mother, 
we are your good little chickens." They thought they were 
chickens. They hadn't found their "thimble." I watched 
them go around the house. "Cluck, cluck! Quack, quack, 
quack !" I saw them go over into the orchard. They came 
to the psychological moment. There was a pool of water to 
the left, but Biddy commanded, "Column right, cluck!" 
Biddy column-righted, but every one of her family saw the 
pool, felt their swim-batteries calling "warmer," and column- 
lefted ! They lit with one splash in that water. Eleven little 
chickens became ducks, for they followed the higher calL 
than the mother-call, the call of their own batteries. 

Biddy was wild. She ran up and down along the water's 
edge. "Children, come right out of that water. You'll 
drown! Come out this minute! What will the neighbors 
say!" 

But they were ducks! They stayed right in the water. 
"Mama, see! We're ducks!" But something snapped in 
Biddy's bosom. She turned her back on those children. 
She came to me with tears in her eyes. "I'm done ! No more 



104 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

chickens for me. Things aren't like they used to be. Here 
I train up my chickens in the way they should go and they 
go to the ducks !" 

Father's Chicken a Duck 

This world is such a world of misfits because we so often 
try to make a good duck into a quack chicken. 

My father was a chicken. I was a duck. My father was a 
Methodist preacher. How the thought of a chicken does 
call up the thought of a preacher! 

My earliest childhood recollections are of my father tak- 
ing me into his study and telling me I was to be a preacher. 
''My boy, I have given you to God!" He would get very 
earnest and his voice would tremble. "You are to have all 
these books." He would point around at the solemn shelves 
of commentaries, homiletics and theologies. "You are to 
stand in my pulpit when I am gone and you are to carry 
on my work." 

O, how he loved his work! No sacrifice was too great 
for his work. He was happiest in sacrificing for his work. 
Those pioneer days when he was a "circuit-rider" in the 
wilderness, our little family watched him come in from his 
work and ran to his saddlebags to find the apples and other 
"quarterage" ofiferings the "brethren and sister'n" had lov- 
ingly put there. He had come on his tired horse perhaps 
fifty miles, and in winter there would be icicles frozen 
around him, for he had to swim some bridgeless rivers. 

I would say, "Yes, father, I will be a preacher." I thought 
father knew. I told the people I was going to be a preacher. 
But one day when I was about twelve years old, a printer 
moved into our little town and opened up the first printing 
office I had ever seen. That print-shop was my duckpond. 
I couldn't stay away from it. I think I had my nose between 
that printer and every box of type he unpacked. 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 105 

''You little rascal, get out of my way !'* And he would 
kick me out. I would go right back. I ran away from school, 
I ran away from home, to get down to that print-shop to 
get kicked out. Why? You tell me why the ducks go to 
the water and I'll tell you why I went to the print-shop. 

When I touched a piece of type, it thrilled my printer 
batteries. I knew I was going to be a printer. The smell of 
printers' ink intoxicated me. I heard a man say the other 
day that the smell of Limberger cheese is the sweetest smell 
in the world for him. I understood. He was a bom cheese- 
maker. 

I became a printer. I could not have become anything 
else. I worked at the case early and late. I read all I could 
about printing. And I am a good printer. I am proud to say 
that. I am proud of a fine print-shop back east, and it is 
the same old joy to get into it. It is part of my playground. 

Behind the Scenes with a Lecturer 

But my father's hair grew grayer. He lost some of his 
interest in life. He argued with me, physically as well as 
spiritually! He scolded me, pleaded with me in a vain 
attempt to stop me from being a printer. ''My boy, you are 
throwing yourself away. You are doing wrong and cannot 
prosper. God called you to preach and here you are disre- 
garding your call." 

Father was mistaken. God called me to print, and father 
was calling me to preach. Down inside of me I knew. 
There were years of this misunderstanding, and then one 
happy day father said, "My boy, you were right and I was 
wrong. I see it now. I have watched you these years. I 
have seen how happy and confident you have been in your 
work. I see it is all a great plan." 

Young people, I am not telling you to disobey your 



106 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

parents. They love you, sacrifice for you, perhaps more 
than you will ever fully understand. But I am hoping that 
when the question of your career comes up, you will make 
them see that you are a Human Flashlight, and that you will 
say, ''Father, mother, uncle, aunt, help me find my batteries 
and make them shine, that I may be happy and make you 
happy." 

And I am hoping that the fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts 
will strive to wake the child that hears no "warmer" call. 

That same print-shop call led me farther into it — into 
being reporter, writer, editor and things like that. It called 
me out on the platform. Here I am a lecturer. And I 
am a grand success as a lecturer! 

''Egotist!" you say. "He can't lecture!" 

No, I can't lecture ! But I am a grand success at getting 
joy out of trying to lecture. A crow can get just as much 
joy out of his singing as a lark, tho he cannot sing so well. 
Yes, I wonder quite as much as you why I am on the plat- 
form. I did not plan it. I am a "Topsy" lecturer — just hap- 
pened. I have always envied the minister and the orator 
with the graces of expression. I was a bashful, timid Httle 
boy who ran away and hid when "company" came to our 
house. I couldn't "speak a piece" in school without suffer- 
ing even more agony than the school. 

I was an actor just once. I was one of the angels in the 
Sunday School Christmas play. I was the angel that said, 
"Glory to God in the highest." I practiced that awake and 
asleep. "Glory to God in the highest!" I got the reputa- 
tion for being very devout. If I fell down, I would say, 
"Glory to God in the highest!" And that night the angel 
flew down on the stage all right before the watchful 
shepherds, but some son of Belial in the vast crowd waiting 
for the Christmas treat shouted, "Oh, see Fatty!" They 
called me "Fatty" because I wasn't fat, only fat-headed. 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 107 

The angel forgot his speech and ran crying off the stage. 

I can always give a fine lecture to myself in the room 
alone, but when I get up before an audience somehow I 
make a mess of it as a general thing. I tell you truly, in 
these more than twenty-five years of trying to speak on 
platforms — every day most of the time, often twice or 
thrice a day, I have never yet made an address that satisfied 
me. There was always a sense of disappointment afterwards. 
I had failed to do all I had planned to do. I could always 
think of some of the things I wanted to say when it was 
too late — the people had gone home. 

Time after time I have gone from these platforms broken- 
hearted. I have gone back to the hotel — if I was so for- 
tunate as to have a hotel for the night and not have to 
travel — ^and a hundred times I have flung myself on the 
bed and ''bawled!" I did not weep — that is entirely too 
slow and dignified — I "bawled !" I was crushed, crestfallen, 
disgraced. I wanted to die — and I couldn't even die ! And 
often I have gone out of town at midnight with inexplicable 
perversity, thinking it would be safer ! 

Usually my worst failures have been where my friends 
or relatives came out to see my "triumph," or where critics 
or bookings managers were in the audience getting my meas- 
ure. I wanted to shine my shiniest, but I generally did 
my shadiest. I would become unnatural trying to show off. 
I would get myself in front of my work, and the audience 
saw a conceited, excited, exaggerated man instead of his 
sincere vision. 

I am discovering that most of the grief came from my 
wounded vanity. 

You say, "Well, if lecturing is so painful, why don't you 
quit it and put us all out of our pain?" When you tell me 
why those ducklings went to the water, perhaps I can tell 
you. 



108 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

I find a joy in trying to tell audiences the things my heart 
tells me are true. I have the privilege of addressing the best 
people of every community in these audiences. I find a 
joy in writing as I travel, and another joy even in over- 
coming the hardships of travel. I am learning better each 
day that all this world is one family, and each one I meet 
can teach me perhaps far more than I can teach him. These 
arduous lecture years have been the happiest years of my 
life so far. 

These things are my playthings. The map is my play- 
ground. I often feel that I should pay audiences for my 
privilege. I often feel that I am the most fortunate person 
in the world. I feel as tho I wouldn't trade jobs with any- 
body in the world. O, I am not boasting nor posing as an 
example of success. I am only a very grateful apprentice 
in the Big Business school. I am holding my daily Thanks- 
giving service.- 

And I have said all this to set you to thinking about your 
own work. When you go back to your home, to your shop, 
to your ofiice, to your farm, make an inventory. Look 
around and say, ''This is my playground. Here I can be 
happiest. Here I can best let my light shine and be what I 
was created to be.'* 

If you cannot say that, go on hunting your "thimble." 
Somewhere you'll find it. And right at hand! Then find 
another "thimble," and another. 



Lop-Sided Schooling 

Our schools are just starting. Herbert N. Casson recently 
wrote : "I asked the wisest man, 'V/hat are the four most 
important things in the world?' He replied, 'Character, 
friendship, marriage, and parenthood." I went to the board 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 109 

of education and asked, Where can I be educated in the 
arts of character, friendship, marriage and parenthood?' 
And the board of education gasped and giggled, 'My word, 
what a silly question !' " 

I have seen poor little stunted, deformed trees brought 
from China. They had been "educated" artificially. W^ 
used to cry out when the Chinese "educated" the feet of 
their girls by binding them. Should we not cry out when 
our own people "educate" the heads of our girls and boys 
by binding them? 

There are correspondence schools that delight to show in 
their advertisements a prosperous well-fed man sitting at 
a desk giving orders to a poorly-dressed man on the other 
side of the rail, who carries a dinner-pail in his hand. The 
man at the desk is the boss ; the dinner-pail man works for 
him. The inference is that the man at the desk is a success 
because he is the boss and gets a large salary, while the 
dinner-pail man is a failure because he is bossed and gets a 
smaller wage. The appeal is to the latter — -if he will only 
take eleven lessons in this justly-famous correspondence 
school he will drop his pail, sit at the desk and be a success ! 

Such false appeals are an affront to the spirit of a democ- 
racy. All honest service is equally honorable, and equally 
successful. Success comes in raising our efficiency and let- 
ting salary take care of itself. Dropping the dinner-pail and 
sitting at the desk may mean a raise in salary and a drop in 
success. What a calamity to all if all the men with dinner- 
pails would suddenly drop them or want to drop them ! It 
is entirely a matter of our abilities. One kind of batteries 
is needed for the desk and another for the dinner-pail. 
Both of them must find larger playgrounds to be more suc- 
cessful in either place. 

The man with the dinner-pail must never think he is a 
failure because he carries it, nor must the man at the desk 



110 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

think he is a success because he sits there. Each is a suc- 
cess to the extent he is developing himself, and he may 
know it by the amount of happiness coming into his life. 

''We can raise your salary," shouts one school. "From 
fourteen cents an hour to railroad president," shrieks an- 
other in its page ad. Another more-dollar-than-development 
school uses up two costly pages to show that one out of 
twenty-five with a college education succeeds greatly, while 
one out of 2,500 without college training succeeds greatly. 
All dollar-yardstick, Outside stuff. By all means, get the 
education, but to develop ourselves not our salary. As we 
develop symmetrically, our salary takes care of itself. 

That is why I have more hurts than happiness in my 
heart when I attend my college alumni reunions. I re- 
member those glorious boys and girls with shining faces 
when we were in school together, and they were all so 
hopeful and ambitious. Now I greet them, and so many 
of them, bumped and scarred by the years, apologetically 
say, 'T haven't succeeded like Bill and Rose. I have had 
a hard time and many a setback." And they go on to ex- 
plain why their pockets are not as full as some of their 
classmates*! Yes, some of them who are in happy homes 
with a fine family growing up around them that "Bill and 
Rose" envy, who have succeeded far beyond them, who have 
become honored and respected members of their community, 
talk such stuff! 

"From log cabin to White House !" As a boy I was fed 
up on this Fourth of July spread-eagle oratory. I was led 
to think that all of us could be president if we would try 
hard enough. Wouldn't the White House totter if we all 
tried to get there! The safety of the White House rests 
upon millions of us staying in our cabins and developing 
ourselves. 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS HI 

We All Are Bossed 

"I want to get up there so I can be my own boss." No 
one is his own boss. The day-laborer has fewer bosses 
than the man "up there." The man working with his hands 
alone has just one boss over him. The higher up you go 
the more bosses you have. Every patron of the company 
you work for bosses it. If the patron is not pleased with 
the company's goods or service, this boss discharges the 
whole company, that is, refuses to buy its goods. 

The railroader works for one boss. The superintendent 
over him works for more bosses. And the whole company 
has a million bosses and has the hardest kind of a time 
pleasing the half of them. So many of these bosses dis- 
agree with each other, so that if the company pleases one 
set of bosses it displeases another set, and thus is getting 
discharged by part of them all the time. It can only stay 
out of bankruptcy by succeeding in pleasing the majority 
of its bosses. 

The man who gets elected to office is bossed by all his con- 
stituents. The governor of a state doesn't govern; every 
citizen governs him. The President of the United States 
is merely the servant of all the people. The man coming 
downtown in his limousine to sit at his desk has far more 
troubles to face than the man coming down on the street- 
car to work for him. 

The Declaration of Independence says that all men are 
created free and equal. That does not mean that all men 
are created free to do as they please, nor to have equal 
farms or fortunes, any more than it means that all men 
should have the same number of carpenter's tools. It de- 
pends upon what kind of batteries we have. Money and 
land are just another kind of tools. 

The Declaration means that all men have the equal right 



112 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

to ^'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." That means 
that all of us have the equal right to self-development. 

Self-Development Stops Jealousy 

No one's success need necessarily be greater than an- 
other's success. This little flashlight I hold in my hand 
is just as successful as the giant searchlight that throws its 
beams for miles. 

The blade of grass can be just as successful as the great 
oak. And one is just as necessary as the other. 

It would be a very unhappy world if all lights were 
giant searchlights, or if all vegetation were giant oaks. 
What a failure a giant searchlight would be trying to find 
a mouse in the pantry ! What a failure the giant oak would 
be trying to sod a lawn ! 

I used to hope I could be a great searchlight. I used to 
think if I could once get in the big tower and get the label 
on me, "Great Searchlight," I would really be one. I would 
have been a great disappointment. The great searchlight 
does not seek the tower, it is compelled to go into it be- 
cause it is so great. Now I am not trying to get anywhere, 
but am trying to lose myself in letting my own light shine, 
and I find it a tremendous, happy job, just being a "tallow 
dip." 

I used to envy other people. Did you ever do that? I 
used to be very uncomfortable because one of my friends 
was doing forty things to my one. He was a youngster who 
came to the city green and raw from the western plains. 
When I first met him I pitied him and tried to steer him. 
I told him that two and two make four. He listened 
patiently and sincerely, and thanked me for telling him 
things. He has always been a wonderful listener. He knew 
so much more than I did, he saw so much farther, reasoned 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 113 

so much better, that today whenever I think of the way I 
used to try to enHghten him, I fall to figuring how much the 
solid ivory in my own head would bring in the open 
market. 

That young fellow started a business, and hardly had it 
under way until he started another. Then he started an- 
other and another. I do not know how many enterprises 
he has going now — all of them going, too. His father 
says when he was a boy he was organizing the other boys 
and getting them to do things for him. A little later, Uncle 
Sam called him to Washington to help organize the war- 
work. 

Now I begin to understand that he has the batteries 
within him that require all this outlet in organizing and 
carrying on. He simply has to go on seeing, dreaming, 
starting and running things, to keep his light shining and 
his talent'S employed. Anything less would be failure and 
unhappiness for him. He might do twice as much as I 
can do, and yet I would be a success and he mostly failure, 
because he has so much greater equipment of machinery to 
keep running and batteries to keep shining. He can do so 
much I cannot do. And I can do some things he cannot 
do! I need him and he needs me just as much. We are 
parts of the same watch, and the whole watch runs for him 
and for me. I am not jealous of him now. I am proud 
of him and rejoice that we all have the service from this 
great searchlight. 

I used to hope to be a great literary star. I would read 
the writings of the great ones and try to imitate them. But 
I could not do what they were doing. Now I understand 
that when they were writing their great literary successes, 
they were just about their Big Business of letting their 
light shine. 

I used to envy the great singers. I wanted to sing. Now 



114 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

I understand the great singers have to sing to use their great 
voice-gift batteries. I have not such batteries. But I get 
joy out of trying to sing. I go off to myself when I try, 
the humane society having suggested it. The great de- 
serve no more credit than the small. The credit goes to 
those who best let their own light shine. 

There is such a relief in seeing this. Each of us has a 
natural monopoly of our own gifts. I read the wonderful 
messages and state papers of President Wilson. I marvel at 
his ability to survey the world and bound and solve its 
problems. I am glad the world has men of such endow- 
ment. I am glad we have the great financiers and business 
generals. I am glad they have the batteries to do such 
things. They have to do them, therefore, to live their 
lives. 

I turn back into history, and read the chapters of achieve- 
ment of generals, discoverers, inventors, composers, explor- 
ers. I take nothing from their deserving famiC — for it is se- 
cure — when I voice the thought that they had to do these 
things to be faithful to their endowment and let their light 
shine. And I can be just as successful as any of them by 
being faithful to my own endowment and letting my own 
light shine ! 

So I am making the happy discovery that when I am jeal- 
ous of the success, fame or popularity of others, I am not 
letting all my own light shine. I discover that we are so 
happy and filled in letting our own talents have symmetri- 
cal and full expression that we have no place for envy of 
others. We become like the stars that sang together at 
creation mom, before the serpent of Little Business 
wriggled in with his selfishness, lies and jealousy. 

It is often stated that of lOO men who go into business, 
97 fail. The world means they failed to make their business 
run. But perhaps that failure was their next step towards 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 115 

success, for it showed that they were on the wrong path 
to being what they were planned to be. And perhaps great 
material success would have spoiled them or retarded their 
highest development. 

Of all the pathetic failures of this life, one of the most 
abject is the man who has by some shrewd investment or 
lucky stroke acquired a great pile of money and has stopped 
right there. He has nothing but money, and he does not 
know how to use it. He cannot buy happiness. 

These are the things our schoolteachers are beginning to 
see. Our schools are just starting the Big Business of Self- 
Development. Teachers are bursting their bonds. Schools 
are places to teach each pupil how to shine all-around and 
not be a lop-sided freak and wobbler thru life. They are 
to untie the strings, remove the wrappings, and help each 
little flashlight to press the buttons and be natural. It is 
a great, joyful job to be a teacher in a school. 

The greatest need of our schools is love, vision, inspira- 
tion. They get enmeshed in red-tape and buried in methods. 
Many a teachers' institute spends the week listening to 
specialists and experts finding fault with present methods 
and splitting hairs. I see the despairing look upon many 
of the teachers' faces. They go back to their schoolrooms 
with notebooks filled with quibbles instead of hearts filled 
with joy and enthusiasm over the privilege of helping the 
next generation find itself. 

Schools Must Teach Success 

Day after day as I travel on these lecture tours I see 
the same monotony of faces — ^tired faces, wistful faces, dis- 
couraged faces, dissipated faces, hard, metallic faces. They 
are on the trains, on the streets, in the hotels. Behind these 
faces, often are the kindest hearts. But so many of them 



116 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

are saying, *'It is too late for me," ''I am living for my 
children," "I never had any chance," *'in my day," "I wish 
I could live my life over." Very few of them look for- 
ward to happier life, but seem to feel they have crossed 
some Rubicon of disability. 

*'In my day." ''My day" for everybody is today. Yester- 
day is dead and buried. Start anew today with the blessed 
lessons of the bumps of yesterday. Go on and don't 
get bumped again in the same place. There was never so 
fine a day as today for you and me to live in, for we never 
before were so finely equipped with experience. 

I love to slip away from these tired fellow-travelers and 
go over to the schoolhouse. I like to gather the children 
around me and talk to them. They are like the sensitive, 
receptive soil of a new garden. They are ready for the seed 
with few clods in the way. So many of the grown-ups, 
just as good soil, have battered down till they have become 
"hardpan." These school children are little flowerbeds. 
They are not ''disillusioned." I am so sorry for people who 
are "disillusioned." They have become Outsiders. These 
schoolchildren's faces beam with hope and faith and love. 
Their life batteries shine. To them every day is a beautiful 
spring morning. They listen eagerly to idealism where the 
grownups listen dully "as a tale that is told." "Fine talk, 
but it won't w^ork out in real life." Our Big Business is 
to get "real life" back to "ideal life." 

I like to talk to school children about their batteries. They 
eagerly agree. They do so want to shine ! I have had them 
write me letters about what they want to be. I have wiped 
my eyes over many of them as they have told of things they 
were yearning to do, but "papa and mama said I shouldn't 
ever think of it again!" 

I keep telling them, "Children, you have what the world 
hungers for — youth, hope, love, opportunity. The world 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 117 

thinks that as the years pass you must lose them. But just 
go on shining and you will find your Aladdin's lamp making 
this world a finer, happier playground all the time. Remem- 
ber, these discouraged older people once had the same happy, 
hopeful faces you have. But they did not go on shining. 

"Some day we may meet again. I shall ask you, 'Are 
you succeeding?' 

'*Do not reply, 'Oh, yes, I am succeeding. See my big 
house up there on the hill.' I shall not care very much 
whether you live in a big house or a little house. That will 
not be the proof of your success. Some of the most unsuc- 
cessful people live in some of the biggest houses. 

"Do not reply, 'Oh, yes, I am succeeding. See my name 
on the front page of the paper.' That is not the proof of 
your success. . Some of the greatest failures get their names 
in the paper in the biggest type. Getting your name in the 
paper means that you have done something unusual enough 
for people to want to read about you. The surest way to 
get into most papers is to steal a horse. The surest way 
to keep out is to be honest. 

"Do not reply, 'Oh, yes, I am succeeding. See the high 
society I move in.' Child, that will be one of the proofs 
you' haven't succeeded, if you are idle enough to do much 
moving in society. 

"Do not reply, 'Oh, yes, I am succeeding. See the great 
fortune I am accumulating.' I shall ask you if you are 
working to make it accumulate, or it is just accumulating 
because you like to work. The dead-line runs between the 
two. And I shall think you are failing if you tell me about 
the accumulating before you tell me about your work. 

"I hope you will have these good things — ^big houses, 
publicity, social standing, riches — if you can grow great 
enough to have them without them having you. Do not get 
the idea that goodness and this real Inside success mean 



118 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

poverty and obscurity. As we shine our wisdom and under- 
standing batteries, like Solomon of old, we get long life, 
riches and honor added. 

''But, children, you will not have to answer me a word. 
I shall be able to read success or failure in your faces as I 
read it in the faces of the people around us. Look over a 
wheat field and you tell how successful it is — whether it 
looks yellow, parched, bare in spots, or is growing luxu- 
riantly. So I shall read hope, faith, love, development, en- 
thusiasm, happiness lighting your faces if you are succeed- 
ing." 

All the World a School 

So the schools of books are just gateways to the greater 
schools. For years I dreamed of a playground school that 
I wanted to go off somewhere and fence in. I wanted to 
make a school where everybody should play all day — 
everybody learn to turn work into play and make every day 
a holiday. Where every bird would sing, every flower blos- 
som, every fish swim. Where the shops and mills and farms 
would be gardens and studios. Where everyone would just 
naturally develop. Where all would be masters because 
all would be servants. 

Visionary ! Impractical ! 

No! I am so happy to discover the school is already 
founded. It is all around us now. It is the whole world we 
live in. It only needs the teachers with the vision. The 
mills, shops, stores, farms, homes are all around us. The 
restless millions of pupils are hungry for teaching. We do 
not need to go off and found some vest-pocket imitation. 
We need to grow great enough and wise enough to teach 
in the world school. And the greatest teaching is our own 
Hfe. 



EDUCATION THE BIG BUSINESS 119 

Our playground begins with the toys around mother's 
knee. It expands into the tops and marbles around our 
dooryard. It widens out into the school and college campus. 
It spreads with the years until it covers the world. The 
years merely enlarge our playground, and bring us bigger 
and better toys. The fence merely expands. GO ON EN- 
LARGING OUR PLAYGROUND. 

We look forward with joy. We shall yet build the struc- 
tures that will not fall, with tools that will not dull. We 
shall paint the pictures that will not fade. The Great Play- 
master stands at each gate beckoning us to get ready for 
the greater games. 

Real, all-around education is the only solution to the 
baffling problems of unhappiness, failure, sin, crime and 
degeneration. But it must develop the all-around man. 



ApilmyoiirM 



CHAPTER VII 

YES, YOU CAN! 

It's Never Too Late to Succeed 

NO HAPPIER, sweeter message could come to young 
people — and to all people who would find the foun- 
tain of perpetual youth — than this: YOU CAN! 
And you must ! You dream dreams and you see visions. 
You want to do things. O, how you want to do things! 
The most preposterous things — and visionary. 

Children confide in somebody older. Perhaps that older, 
more ^'practical" somebody pooh-poohs the dream. "For- 
get it, child, you can't do that." Pretty soon the child for- 
gets it and gives up trying to follow the heavenly vision, 
or shuts up like a clam, confiding no more but holding on to 
the guilty secret. 

I am sorry for two kinds of people — people who have 
no dreams and people who are always "practical." It seems 
to me the first kind have not waked and the second kind 
have gone to sleep. Dreams are the realities of life. What 
we see in this world is only somebody's more or less imper- 
fect attempt to translate his dream into matter. Every 
book, every picture, every law, building, machine, railroad 
or empire is just a feeble glimpse of somebody's dream. 
Fulton dreamed of a steamboat, and the world only saw 
120 



YES, YOU CAN ! 121 

"Fulton's folly." The first railroad across the West was 
a much-ridiculed dream. The first flying-machine was re- 
ceived with so much derision that Langley went to his 
grave with a broken heart. 

Joseph, the dreamer, saves his "practical" brethren. The 
dreamer has always been the saviour of the race. "Where 
there is no vision the people perish." 

Canning "You Can't!" 

Children (no matter if ninety!), what do you want to 
do ? You can do it. Be happy that you want to do it. Hold 
on to that dream. It is a precious, sacred thing. Do you 
want to sing, to speak, to write, act, build, study, invent, or 
work with head, hands or heart ? YOU CAN ! That sin- 
cere longing within you is your call. There is a battery 
calling to shine. 

I am happy when a child confides in me. I am happy 
when I get a certain kind of letter that comes very often. 
It is not a business letter; it is a Big Business letter. It is 
a real love-letter that some girl or boy I may never have 
seen has had confidence enough in me to write. It may be 
written in the copy-book style of penmanship, maybe on 
perfumed paper, maybe on a torn page from a scratch-pad. 
But my heart beats a little faster as I read it, and often 
I wipe my eyes. It is a letter from some youngster — maybe 
from some gray-haired youngster — who has confided in me 
and taken me into the holy of holies. I write back : "Sure ! 
You can! God bless you, go to it!" 

You can I And your great happiness will come in trying 
to make your dreams come true. No matter how high the 
obstacles pile around you, your joy will be in flying that 
much higher over them. There was never a wing given to 
a bird there was not a place for it to fly. There was never 



122 THE Bia BUSINESS OF LIFE 

a fin given to a fish there was not water for it to swim in. 
And there was never a battery given to anybody there was 
not a place for it to shine. 

The bird would not want to fly if it had no wings. The 
fish would not want to swim if it had no fins. 

Of course, the world immediately says, "You can't!'* 
The world challenges us every step. That is a part of our 
testing. But we must push past the sentry-lines with the 
password, *T can!" We must "can" the "can't." 

Schumann-Heink Wouldn't Give Up 

A poor girl of the Old World had a great yearning to sing. 
She went to the Hof Opera director in Vienna and asked 
him to hear her sing. He was not impressed. I am never 
very deeply impressed with expert testimony. I would be- 
lieve the tyro's "I can" before the jaded critic's "You 
can't." In these try-outs the applicant generally does the 
poorest instead of the best, being generally "scared stiff." 
You remember that even Caruso was told by an early 
teacher that he would never sing very well! And about 
every great one in any line has been told the same. 

This director said to the poor girl, "What! You sing! 
With such a face and no personality at all ! How can you 
expect to succeed at all? Ach! Impossible! My girl, 
give up the idea of singing and go back home. Buy a 
sewing-machine and go to work. You will never be a 
singer." 

The girl did go back home, and did go to work on the 
sewing-machine, but she did not quit trying to sing. She 
followed that sing-battery call thru the years of struggle. 
She was married and then forced to live in almost hopeless 
poverty, deserted by her husband, struggling to feed her 
children, with the landlord threatening to evict her for non- 



YES, YOU CAN ! 123 

payment of rent, and the sheriff threatening to take the few 
pieces of furniture she still had left. 

O, girls, so many of you are "slackers" with your calls 
and your talents. So many of you sit around with hands 
folded over a 'Vanity-box," abject slaves to the tyranny of 
a medievalism that considered a woman as a pretty canary- 
bird to sing caged-up in a world built for men. You say, 
*'What is the use of my trying to develop mysdf ? I have 
no future." You seem to think that all there is in life for 
you is to sit smiling until some Lochinvar rushes in with 
his "flivver" and steals you! 

The world war was indeed a war of liberation — liberation 
of sexes as well as of nations. The glory of femininity 
today is not its helplessness, but its helpfulness. 

Schumann-Heink struggled on true to her call to sing. 
She sang with a babe in her arms. She learned grand opera 
as she rocked the cradle. She would put her children to 
sleep at night, and then leave them in their pitiful quarters 
alone while she went down to a cheap theater and sang for 
a pittance, tortured with the thought of what might hap- 
pen to them left alone. 

Isn't this success? Wouldn't Schumann-Heink have suc- 
ceeded in becoming a singer had she never become known ? 
The joy of that struggle saved her from her hopeless 
plight. All that followed was the world's labeling. There 
came the night when the grand opera star failed to appear 
in the cast. All unrehearsed this unknown contralto was 
hastily pushed into the part. She had been learning that 
part as she rocked the cradle. No preparation is ever 
wasted. She made the great hit. The director came rush- 
ing to her after the performance. "Wonderfiil! Let me 
congratulate you!" 

And the next was a sweet moment for Schumann-Heink. 
"Well ! Well ! You are the man who told me to go home 



124 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

and buy a sewing-machine ! I have to thank you for stirring 
my ambition." 

''Never give up," is her message to young people. "Never 
beheve them when they tell you you can't. You can!" 

Leopold Auer, who has discovered and taught so many 
great violinists, says it even more emphatically: ''You 
must be poor. And it is best that you come from a large 
family. There is something, I know not what, that is bred 
in the soul by poverty. It is something mystic. To feel this 
terrible need is the motive power that drives genius. It de- 
velops feeling; it makes both force and tenderness." He 
adds : "A worker without genius is better than a genius 
who won't work." 

True Calls and False Calls 

While few of us may become singers like the world's 
great contralto, I believe that all who feel that urge to sing 
can get just as much happiness in trying to sing. If some 
child should say, "I want to jump to the moon," I would 
say, "All right ! Now ! One for the money, two for the 
show, three to make ready, and four to go ! Jump !■" 

You think I should not encourage the child or anybody 
else to try to do the impossible ? What is impossible ? The 
way we go on breaking records and "canning" the "can'ts" 
today, who knows but what the next stunt is to jump to the 
moon? Confidentially, I agree with you that the child will 
likely never jump to the moon — I don't think that the child 
has any call to jump to the moon, but there is some battery 
in the child calling to jump out toward the moon. The 
child hasn't interpreted the call rightly. Now if the child 
will jump just as far towards the moon as it can, I think 
it is going to land in its playground, or get nearer to it. 

You see, we hear the calls so vaguely at first. I used 



YES, YOU CAN ! 125 

to think I had a call to be a brakeman on a railroad train. 
But I had no brakeman battery — I just wanted to ride on a 
swaying car. Many a girl thinks she has a call to be a 
movie actress when she merely wants to wear Mary Pick- 
ford curls and get photographed. Many a person goes fol- 
lowing some "warmer" call from one profession to another, 
and is right, each change getting him nearer his real play- 
ground. 

The other day I saw a dozen trains standing side by side 
in the St. Louis Union Station. They were all to go dif- 
ferent directions. One was placarded "To New York," 
another "To San Francisco," another "To Chicago," another 
"To New Orleans." Yet as each train started to follow its 
call, it went the same direction as all the rest to get out of 
the station. The first call was to get out into the yards. The 
train for New York was really called first to run the oppo- 
site direction. "That train will never get to New York 
going that way," you say. But wait. As it follows its first 
call, a switch clicks and it is now called to veer a bit to 
the north. It follows till another switch turns it farther 
eastward, and presently it finds itself heading directly for 
New York. 

You had a call to come down town this morning. You 
couldn't come direct, so the call led you first east to one 
street-corner, then south to another, and so on. The dog 
follows the scent uphill and down, first this way and 
that. BUT HE STAYS RIGHT ON THE TRAIL 
WHEREVER IT LEADS. That is success. So many of 
us either quit running discouraged or chase about with- the 
tramp's wanderlust. 

Somebody says, "Man, if I follow my natural calls I'll go 
to jail !" No — ^the true calls always lead upward to a higher, 
purer, happier self -development. We are never called to 
do wrong, for there isn't any wrong battery in us. 



126 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

Get that ! When we think we are following the call of a 
wrong battery, we are merely FAILING TO FOLLOW 
the call of our life batteries of Faith, Hope and Love; 
When we develop rightly, we never develop wrongly. The 
shining is the positive fight of our lives. The evil is the lack 
of shining, the negative darkness, dissipated when we shine. 
The evil, unhappy person is always a lop-sided person, not 
shining all around. The thief isn't shining his honesty bat- 
tery. The spendthrift isn't shining his thrift battery. Some- 
body thinks he had a bad impulse, but he learns he lacks 
a good impulse. '*Dr. Jekyll" doesn't develop into *'Mr. 
Hyde." "J^^y^^" ^^i^s to develop, and "Hyde" is the failure. 

Then Go Home and Sing! 

But it is quite right to want to sing to audiences. Go up 
to the bureau or to the impresario and ask for a position to 
sing. You will have to be very tdlented to interest them. You 
may find it hard to get a hearing. A manager recently said 
he had given interviews to 20,chx> applicants for platform 
positions, and had given hearings to half that many the 
past twenty years. These were all concert applicants. 
"It seems like more than a million," he adds! He thinks 
he has heard twice or thrice as many more reader and lec- 
ture appHcants. So you realize a busy manager must cut 
his hearings short. And yet they are so eager to find a 
real prize. 

I do not like to be around bureau offices. Too many 
tragedies there. Too many young people coming out with 
red eyes after being refused places. For every singer on 
the stage maybe a hundred or a thousand were refused. 
Truly, many are called and few are chosen! 

Won't they hire you to sing? Are you going to say, 
'There, that settles it. I can't sing, or they'd take me." 



YES, YOU CAN ! 127 

No ! No ! Suppose a bird should go to the manager and 
say, *Tlease hire me to sing in your front tree. Suppose the 
flower should ask, *Tlease, Mr. Manager, hire me to blos- 
som in your front-yard." If the manager would shake his 
head, do you suppose the bird and the flower would go 
away and say, "I'm not a bird, I can't sing." "I'm not a 
flower, I can't blossom." No, they would know the tree had 
enough birds to sing in it and the front-yard had enough 
flowers in it. They would know, too, that all the world is 
left to sing and blossom in. 

So, child, all the world is left for you to sing in. Go back 
home and sing. Sing at church, sing at home. We need 
thousands to sing at home to one to sing on anybody's stage. 
To my mind there is no sweeter music than the contented 
song of the woman at her home work, or the whistle of the 
man at his job, or the lullaby of the mother at the cradle. 

If they won't let you sing at church or at home, go out 
in the barn and sing to the horses and cows. If they kick 
on your singing, go away out in the woods and sing to your- 
self. Crawl in a hole and sing to the only audience that 
really counts — yourself! It is the joy of singing. You 
sing to express yourself, and nobody in the world but your- 
self can prevent you from being happy in singing. 

Over in the field are millions of flowers. It matters little 
where they blossom, or which is great and which is small. 
It matters little whether they are ever gathered and sold 
in bouquets. But it matters much that they blossom wher- 
ever they are. 

And if you want to get before audiences — if you want 
to sing, read, lecture, impersonate, entertain, act — start your 
work right at home. Practice on your neighbors. Sing, 
lecture, act at every opportunity. If you really are gifted 
sufficiently to go before audiences, you will make your own 



128 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

audiences, and you will not have to go hunting managers. 
The managers will come hunting you. 

Encourage Those Amateurs 

There is too much clash between "highbrow" and "low- 
brow" in music and every form of expression, it seems to 
me. The intellectual laughs at the one of less development 
along his line. But sometimes he shouts, "Get the hook!" 
for somebody who has made equal or more development 
along other lines. The upperclassmen do not condemn the 
primary pupils. Let us be tolerant and let each one be in his 
or her stage of development as long as they find pleasure in 
that form of expression. They must go on developing to 
continue their pleasure or grow stale. 

When I hear somebody with a poor voice and little musi- 
cal ability trying to sing, when I hear an amateur orchestra 
or band doing its joyful best, I respect their sincere efforts 
to follow the call. No matter what the music is — classic or 
unclassic, "highbrow," "lowbrow" or no brow, ragtime or 
the jazziest of the jazz — I now respect it to the extent it is 
giving joy to the players, even tho I have to move out of 
earshot. I would not try to educate them too rapidly, any 
more than I would take a rattlebox away from a baby, until 
it grows and gets tired of the rattle. That "baby" may be 
a giant some other way. 

The amateur has just as much right to like his rattlebox 
music, "something quick and devilish," as the "highbrow" 
has to like his classics. The Chinaman laughs at our sen- 
suous, simple, harmonious music, just as we laugh at the 
noises he calls music, tho I believe his music may be more 
intellectual, for each tone conveys a distinct thought or 
picture. 

The amateur often gets far more joy out of his music than 



YES, YOU CAN ! 129 

the professional who is metering out a higher-grade. A 
musical critic recently said he would rather hear some 
young, half-developed musicians than some artists who have 
"arrived." One is a musical Insider radiating enthusiasm, 
the bloom on the peach, while the other has become a half- 
hearted Outsider retailing it by the joyless yard. Keeping 
the bloom is keeping successful. 

I have often been disappointed in hearing a famous 
speaker. He gave the words of the lecture that_made him 
famous when he illuminated them with the zest, joy and 
enthusiasm of development — only gave the words ! He had 
quit growing. 

But artistry should never stop. A violin virtuoso told 
me he never picked up his violin to play that he did not feel 
he was just glimpsing the possibilities of his violin. One of 
the greatest lecturers told me that he never gave a lecture 
that he had given over 5,000 times that it did not seem new 
to him, and a joy to give it. This is the kind that never 
fail, for Emerson said it truly, "Nothing great was ever 
achieved without enthusiasm." 

Go On Writing! 

The young writer sends his poem or story to the pub- 
lishing office and never hears from it, or else gets back the 
cold form letter : "We regret that we cannot use your con- 
tribution." 

I know full well the hurt of the young writer. I have 
been hurt over and over that way. Now that I am an editor 
myself, I never laugh at anything sent me to publish, no 
matter how crude it may be, for I know that it is far morr 
sincere expression than much of the so-called professional 
hack-writing that does "get over." I want to write a kind 
note of appreciation. There is mighty little sent an editor 



130 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

that he can use. He has to go after what he wants. Yet 
editors and managers keep hunting for talent. A mana- 
ger told me he spent half his time looking for real attrac- 
tions and the other half dodging would-be attractions. 

Go on writing, if you have joy in writing It is a mental 
playground. It doesfi't matter in the least whether they 
will print it or not. Maybe for the sake of humanity and 
the conservation of print-paper, nine-tenths of all writing 
should be waste-basketed. 

Here is a song-writer who sees it rightly. In his letter to 
a magazine, he says: 

"I am a railroad conductor — and a song writer. The song-writing 
is a side line with me, but I get a good deal of enjoyment out of 
it. It is difficult for me to tell you which gives me the greater 
amusement — sitting up to the 'wee sma' hours' trying to make a 
proper melody out of the muse, or reading the rejection slips of 
the music publishers. I should worry! As long as I am able to 
pull freight I can laugh at rejection slips." 

And the magazine editor joyfully comments : 

"It was Rousseau, as we remember, who remarked that no man 
ought to be dependent upon literature for a livelihood. It should 
be a glorious side-line to his regular job of farming, stevedoring 
or plumbing. We congratulate you ! It would give ii5 less pain 
in sending out our own rejection slips if we knew that every one 
who received them had a good job and was writing for the 
fun of it" 

Then Get a ** Meal-Ticket*' 

But you say, "If they don't hire me, I'll starve." 
Why? It is so uncomfortable to starve! Be natural. 
The bird goes right on singing. The flower goes right on 
blossoming. So you should follow that call wherever it 



YES, YOU Can ! 131 

leads and never decide by how much money you can get 
for following it, but how much happiness you can get by 
expressing thus your natural self. Thus we decide our real 
life work. 

Please do not think this is just the philosophizing of a 
dreamer, a "nut'* or a "mollycoddle." I have been com- 
pelled by poverty to make my own way ever since a boy. 
From boyhood I have known nothing but work and struggle. 
Yet every day I get surer our main business is following the 
calls we love, and working at other things, if necessary, to 
sustain us. Every dream of my childhood is coming more 
than true. 

The bird gets no salary for singing. The bird does not 
ask Carnegie endowment. The bird perches on any tree 
he prefers and pours out his song. Presently he says, "My 
goodness, it is dinner-time. I'm hungry." He stops his 
singing, puts a sign on his studio-door : 



Gone to dinner. Back when I get 
my stomach full. 

'A. Bird 



Then A. Bird goes out and rustles for worms and bugs 
until he gets his stomach full. He next goes back to the 
tree and starts right in on the Hallelujah Chorus where he 
left off on page 92. And the flower goes on blossoming. 
But as nobody feeds it, it "roots" for a living all the time ! 

So if you and I cannot make a living at our "thimble" 
jobs, we'll have to go on with them and get "mealticket" 
jobs along with them. Maybe we'll have to saw wood or 
carry a hod and do our singing and blossoming between 
times. 



132 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

We Must Shine All Around 

So many people develop a few batteries of genius and 
stop at that. These lopsided shiners have a hard time 
maybe getting enough to eat or wear because they do not 
develop their make-a-living and **horse-sense" batteries. 
They growl at this world and say it is unappreciative of 
art and ungrateful for their genius. Shucks ! This a great 
old playground for well-balanced players, but has no more 
place for the lop-sided specialists than the highway has for 
an auto with a blind driver. 

I never could sympathize very much with a mighty good 
violinist I once knew who fiddled himself to skin and bones 
up in an attic and mourned because the world didn't appre- 
ciate his art. Nor with the artist who nearly starved to 
death because the public didn't climb four flights of stairs 
to buy his pictures. It doesn't matter in the least whether 
anybody else appreciates our products, if we do. Our next 
move is to develop our wisdom and understanding batteries 
to find a "mealticket" and make a living. 

Happiness in Reach of Everybody 

Whenever we find unhappy people, right there we find 
happy people, living under the same conditions, breathing 
the same air, eating the same kind of food. We find the 
unhappy people and the happy people side by side in the 
city and in the country, in avenues and alleys, in palaces and 
cabins, in kitchens and parlors, on land and sea, in plenty 
and poverty, feast and famine. 

As the transcontinental train crosses bare western plains, 
one sometimes sees a little "shack" or "dugout" miles and 
miles away from other human habitation. Some fashion- 
ably dressed passenger in the observation car discovers it, 



YES, YOU CAN! 133 

adjusts his monocle and makes the bright, bromidic com- 
ment, ''Look I Look out there ! • How can anybody endure 
it to live out there on that desert a thousand miles from 
nowhere. Not a push-button in reach. It must be ter- 
rible." 

And often in that "shack" or "dugout" there are hap- 
pier people than aboard those Pullmans. 

So often the people out in the country or the frontier 
regions have the wrong thought about it themselves, and 
they say to the visitor, "You must not expect city advan- 
tages out here. We have to do without a lot of things, 
living so far away from civilization. We are off the main 
line, you know, and out of touch with the world." 

"City advantages!" What are they? We must have 
cities and millions must live in them, but for every advan- 
tage the city-dweller must take on two disadvantages. "Off 
the main lines" of dirt, noise, crowds, stuffiness, squalor, 
gossip, dissipation, excess, fever, artificiality, but right on 
the main lines of sunshine, fresh air, flowers, birds, grass, 
beauty, privilege, inspii-ation, opportunity, with hearts as 
true and homes as sacred. And civilization is bringing every 
good thing of the city right to the country-man's door. 

Look Right Around You! 

An artist once asked me to take him out in the country 
where he could sketch a landscape. I was very much 
flattered. I set out with him and walked an hour into 
the country. A mile he followed me, then another mile. 
At last he sat down on the roadside. "Where are you 
taking me?" 

"It is only a mile farther." I was thinking of a little lake 
and a hillside where I thought he might make a picture. I 
thought no picture could be made without a lake and a 



134 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

hillside in it. "That is the nearest place to a landscape. 
There is nothing around here." 

The artist laughed. "Man, where are your eyes? Don't 
go a step farther. We have been passing beautiful land- 
scapes all the way, and right here are wonderful ones.'' 

''Where?" 

He climbed the fence and sat down between two rows 
of corn. He began to sketch what he saw there. He drew 
two rows of corn with the pumpkin-vines growing between. 
He sketched the stalks, the waving blades and the grace- 
ful pumpkin leaves, and as I watched him I saw for the 
first time how beautiful these things are. He made a 
fine picture of what I had never before noticed right around 
me. 

*'That is the trouble with people," he said. "They so 
often think they have to go away off, over to Europe or to 
the other side of the world, to find the beautiful and precious 
things, when they can find them right in their own back- 
yards.'' 

Same thing the porter said that day : "Goin' from where 
dey are to where dey ain't." 

Let us throw away our telescopes and -get microscopes! 
People who burn up thousands of miles in their big touring 
cars may not really tour as much as the one who walks a 
mile. A dollar buys some people more than a million buys 
others. 

Grandfather used to run around asking, "Where's my 
spectacles? Somebody's got my spectacles." And all the 
time they were on his nose. Did you ever see a man rushing 
wildly thru the storm to get to shelter, with an umbrella 
under his arm ? 

Maeterlinck's "Bluebird" tells it wonderfully well. The 
little brother and sister Tyltyl and Mytyl, set out to find the 
bluebird of happiness. They leave their home and go 
searching everywhere in the earth for it. And after weari- 



YES, YOU CAN I 135 

some journeys in which they fail to find it, a kinder mood 
comes to them, the lesson of love and service to others 
comes into their own hearts. Then, lo! they discover the 
bluebird right back there in their own home ! 

He Saw Ants, Not Niagara 

Because your playground and mine are different is no 
reason why one should fault the other. That farmer who 
looked at Niagara Falls and said, "This would be a bully 
place to wash sheep!" has been pitied and laughed at since 
that joke was first peddled. But perhaps that farmer got 
more real joy out of caring for his sheep than most of those 
who have laughed at him can get out of the grandeur of 
Niagara that failed to interest the farmer. 

For there is a distinguished bacteriologist of Chicago who 
went to Niagara for the first time. His friend led him 
to the wonder cataract and waited to hear his rapturous out- 
bursts. Not hearing anything, he turned to look at the 
bacteriologist. He had given one glance at the falls and 
then stooped down on the ground where they were stand- 
ing. He had seen a colony of ants there, and he lost all 
interest in the falls. His playground was that anthill, and 
for four solid hours that man watched and studied those 
ants, for it was a new species for him. He paid scant 
attention to the falls, but thanked his friend for taking him 
to the anthilU He came away with a notebook full of 
new ant-ology. 

I might add that bacteriology and entomology are his 
"thimble" jobs. His "meal ticket" job is dentistry. 

Happiness More Than Cheerful Veneer 

Happiness? So many reply, "That means cheer up, 
cheer up! Just smile! Grin and bear it! Let the other 
fellow do the worrying!" 



136 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

O, there are so many people saying that and preaching 
that Sooner or later they discover the emptiness of their 
own talk, for they are trying to Hft themselves by their 
bootstraps. This veneered cheerfulness is cheerful idiocy. 

This "Smile, you, smile !" talk is the talk of the dope 

fiend. It is the talk of the drunkard who becomes intoxi- 
cated to drown his troubles. It is the ostrich sticking his 
head in the sand. It is running away from trouble instead 
of overcoming it. It is painting the face to cover up a bad 
complexion. And a lot of the society "cheer up" and parlor 
piffle is merely social cosmetic and polite paint. 

"Let the other fellow do the worrying." If we have done 
anything to worry about, is it not dishonest to shove the 
worrying off upon the other fellow? 

To cure unhappiness, treat the cause, not the countenance. 
Happiness is more than a grin on our face ; it is a glory in 
our heart. It is the knowledge of being in our place. It is 
the consciousness that our machinery is working perfectly 
and harmoniously at the job for which it was designed. It 
is having our name written in the Blue Book of life. It 
is the delight of seeing our rating daily rising in the divine 
Dun & Bradstreet. 

"But you can't be happy all the time. Jesus was the man 
of sorrows." 

"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest." Not the loafer's rest, either on 
earth or in heaven. But the rest of increasing right activity. 
That is the ultimate abolition of labor and the Big Business 
of turning the universe into a playground. One of the 
reasons why I didn't want to get to heaven when I was a 
little boy was that I would get so tired of sitting around 
with a harp and just shouting, "Glory!" I wanted to go 
where I could do things. Today we are better realizing that 



YES, YOU CAN ! 137 

the real heaven is the ultimate playground of infinitely mul- 
tiplied activities. 

It is a dismal man-made theology that has sought to rep- 
resent the Master as a man or sorrows. It is a hectic art 
that paints him so. Meekness, love, gentleness, purity, char- 
acter, do not mean sorrow. They spell joy, triumph, glory, 
victory, success ! Jesus was the happiest man the world ever 
looked upon, because the most successful Big Businessman. 
His constant greetings were, "Rejoice!" "Be of good 
cheer !" "Fear not !" "Give thanks !" 

One reason you and I do not grow faster is because we 
do not rejoice enough. We get more as we are grateful 
for what we have. Every day should be Thanksgiving day. 

Get Out of Your Cage! 

Everywhere are dull plodders and self-denying souls. 
They say, "My day is past. I am living for my children 
now." They forget that the best way to live for their chil- 
dren is to live a symmetrical, shining life before their 
children as an example. They say, "All my life I have 
wanted to do things, but I have never been situated so that 
I could. Now it is too late. I am too old. All my life 
I have beat my wings against a cage." 

Who made the cage? The prisoner in it! Much of the 
"settling down in life" is letting down in life. Aladdin is 
immortal. Press the button and the cage disappears with 
the shadows. There are no cages to our light within. 

Study the plant that goes on leafing, blossoming, function- 
ing thru its entire life. Stunt it, lop off its branches, cripple 
. it, shatter it. The remains do not crawl off into a pickle- 
jar in a museum and mourn about "in my day." Whatever 
is left of that plant does not waste a minute sympathizing 



138 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

with itself and saying, "Once I was young and fair. They 
didn't treat me right. Now it is too late." It pulls itself 
together and goes on being what it was built to be, just the 
best it can, with all the "pep" possible. And right where it 
is! If it cannot grow six feet high, it tries to grow six 
inches high, or it pushes upward with its dying breath. 

There is a plant you have seen called the *' resurrection 
plant." It looks like a dried ball, and I am told you can leave 
it around indefinitely all dried up and withered. But that 
plant does not resign. It holds on to its blue-print and 
merely hums, "It's a long dry spell," like the Kaffir com on 
the arid western plains. Put water on it and it soaks up, 
unrolls its leaflets and smiles up at you all green as tho 
nothing had happened. 

I have read that they found grains of wheat in the 
mummy casings exhumed in Egypt. Nobody knows for 
sure how many centuries those grains lay with the retired 
Pharaohs, never once giving up the ghost but whispering, 
"There'll come a time." The proud and mighty rulers of 
JEgypt gave up and mummified, but the humble wheat did 
not, and so it grew joyously in the sunshine of the Twen- 
tieth Century! 

How Napoleon Rejuvenated 

For years I drove an old sorrel horse that used to look 
sadly at me out of his watery eyes every time I hitched him 
up to the plow or wagon. His name was Napoleon Bona- 
parte, but he had lost his interest in life and acted more 
like he was on St. Helena. We shortened his name to 
"Bony," which was more fitting, for the bony-part was 
about all that was left of him. 

One day when I had him hitched to the spring-wagon, 
somebody attempted to drive around him. Ordinarily this 



YES, YOU CAN ! 139 

was no chore, for "Bony" was imbued with the idea he was 
leading his own funeral procession, and no amount of 
urging could speed him up. It did so exhaust him to trot. 
I would swat him over the rafters and he would come out 
of his trance long enough to trot a couple of trots that came 
out of him like pulling wisdom teeth, and then his steam 
would run down. "Bony" was on the retired list and 
grieved that I did not know it. 

But that day the man who attempted to go around was 
driving a sulky, and he didn't go around. "Bony" looked 
out of the corner of his weary eyes, saw that sulky, and 
then something happened! He pricked up his ears, lifted 
his head, sneezed a couple of times and "lit out!" Fond 
memories came back — memories of county Tairs and three- 
minute trots when he was Napoleon Bonaparte. I clung to 
the lines scared and delighted. That sulky man never got 
near us as the spring-wagon hit the high spots. 

He Was an Eagle! 

They kept an old eagle in a cage, where he sat day by 
day dully looking out at the people that stared at him. He 
made no friends and had no interest in anything. People 
came every day and looked at that sleepy bird, and he batted 
his old eyes at them. Nothing interested that eagle. The 
sun, the breezes, the sky meant nothing, for he was in 
a cage and had "seen his best days." 

One day somebody left the cage open. That drowsy 
bird that had been saying, "My day is past. I shall never 
fly again," looked out of the corner of his eye thru the open 
cage-door. He saw a new world beckoning to him. He 
opened his eyes wider. He gripped his perch with a new 
grip. The tips of his wings began to tingle. The calls of 
the heavens again warmed his heart. He stretched a wing. 



140 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

and it was all there. He stretched the other wing and it was 
all there. He stuck his head out of the cage-door, spread 
those rusty wings once more, and with a glad scream shot 
upward toward the sun. He became a speck in the sky. 
He was an eagle! 

But He Thought He Was a Chicken! 

A friend tells me how a farmer located near the moun- 
tains once caught an eaglet which had not learned to fly. He 
put it in the barnyard with his chickens to see how it would 
develop there. A chicken is a fine fowl, but its outlook 
upon life rarely rises higher than the fence. So this eaglet 
stayed right with the chickens and didn't look above the 
fence. 

A stranger asked the farmer, "Isn't that an eagle there 
among your chickens?" "Yes," said the farmer, "but he 
thinks he is a chicken." The stranger caught the eagle 
and held him aloft, but the bird kept his eyes on the ground, 
and when released fell to the earth and resumed scratching 
like the chickens. 

But the next day at dawn the stranger took that eagle to 
the ridge of the barn and held him as high as he could with 
his head toward the rising sun. The eagle raised his head, 
blinked at the sun, and looked across to the mountain where 
his mother had nested him. Then he spread his wings and 
with a scream of joy took to the air for his mountain home. 

The cage-door is open for everyone of us. And we are 
eagles. Let us begin our resurrection this side of the grave. 
Press the button ! 

Irrigate! 

When I was a boy I studied in school the map of the 
United States that showed the western half a great white 



YES, YOU CAN! 141 

expanse called ''Great American Desert." It produced little. 
It had few towns. People who traveled over it came back 
and wrote books about "Western Wilds" and agents 
peddled the books. How I used to read "Western Wilds" 
and thrill over the Indian fighting, lonely adventures, gold 
hunting and buffalo-shooting! Little did I think I would 
ever travel this country and find there cities abreast of the 
world in progress, and whole states leading the Union in 
literacy. 

That map of the "Great American Desert" showed just 
one railroad across the West, and the Government helped 
to build it. Statesmen said the Government's investment in 
that road would be money wasted. Nothing could come out 
of that sand and sagebrush, fit only for the savage and the 
coyote. 

I am only a youngster yet — in heart — ^but in these few 
years I have seen a dozen railroads cross the West and vein 
it with a network of branch lines. The "Great American 
Desert" had been waiting these ages for the inspiration of 
water and cultivation. All the elements y^ere there waiting 
to be discovered. 

Today I see the map of humanity, the last "Great Ameri- 
can Desert." It Is tired, discouraged, thirsty, hungry. It 
asks for bread and false education gives it husks. I know, 
that every part of this desert can bloom. The batteries 
wait to be touched. Irrigate! Every child is a bundle of 
happy possibilities, every grownup a dim prophecy of what 
might be. That tramp or beggar may be a potential Persh- 
ing or Peter the Great. That policeman may be saying 
"Move on !" to some "dud" artist or inventor. That failure- 
may be only a few laps behind that success. Success and 
happiness plead to enter every life. 

I know that failure and disappointment can be overcome. 
I know that troubles can be turned into blessings. The 



142 THE BIG BUSINESS OF LIFE 

grain of sand was a trouble that pushed into the home of the 
oyster. It could not push it out, so it covered it with beauty 
and turned it into a pearl. I know that every trouble, 
handicap and burden we cannot cure we can turn into a 
jewel to deck the walls of our house of life. 

And I know that it is not a matter of brains or brilliancy 
or location, for the dullest oyster down in the dark sea-bot- 
tom can make a finer pearl than the smartest scientist in 
his endowed laboratory. 

This Is the Philosopher's Stone 

All the restless ages have sought the Philosopher's Stone 
whose touch would transmute all things into gold. 

We have looked Outside. But here it is in everybody's 
life. Inside. Big Business I have called it in this talk. It 
turns everything it touches into pure gold. It transforms 
kitchen walls into palace halls. It transforms the gross into 
the glorious. It makes the serf a sovereign. It turns hope- 
less drudgery into hopeful service. It turns necessity into 
privilege. It gives power to the powerless. It teaches that 
nothing is unworthy, no work contemptible, no life unde- 
serving. It shows the child its path, the man his privilege, 
the veteran his victory. It opens blind eyes, unstops deaf 
ears. It dissolves the world's system of caste, shows the 
true success and happiness for all, and writes a new diction- 
ary of meanings. 

The Big Business of Life — ^the business of abolishing 
work and keeping this world a continually enlarging play- 
ground ! 

SO I SHALL TRY TODAY 

TO WORK LESS 

AND PLAY MORE 



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